Both of these pieces are responding to the chaos of the initial years of the second Trump administration in the United States.
The New Look is reflective of the ways in which the current campaign of terror engendered by ICE/DHS in our immigrant communities echoes the invocation of the Alien Enemy Act in Executive Order 9066 to legitimize the mass incarceration of people of Japanese heritage from across the West Coast during World War II. It is also responding to the aesthetization of the "tactical" look in this new era of fascism.
Similarly, Always Save the Liquid tackles the weaponization of the aesthetics of the idealized wealthy white women (Mar-a-Lago face) as part of the package of cultural practices meant to reinforce the cisgender, heterosexual patriarchal underpinnings of the Christian Nationalist hegemonic project.
