Fashion designer Camilo Morales has skillfully repurposed political vinyl banners from the latest elections in Mexico to create fashionable purses, outfits, and accessories.
Fashion designer Camilo Morales has created bags, clothes, and accessories out of upcycling everything from fabric scraps to plastic shopping sacks. Vinyl political ads for politicians in Sunday’s municipal, state, and federal elections in Mexico are his most recent source of raw material. Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City and the country’s first female president, was one of the winners. Morales has been tearing down the omnipresent banners for the past year, cutting them with scissors, and stitching them into tote bags that he sells for between 100 and 600 pesos ($5.44 and $32.63).
Morales remarked, “This election season was ridiculous.” “They began (hanging up ads) so quickly.” Most advertising utilize an all-white backdrop, but Morales’s cheapest bags—sold under his trademark Rere—feature this background. The priciest one has a collage of Clara Brugada’s severely veiled eyes; she is the nominee of the ruling party and is expected to become the next mayor of Mexico City. Morales remarked, “I joked that they practically grew on trees.” “At night I would take down one ad, and the next day another one was already there to take its place.”
Workers began taking down political party advertisements this week, as required by election legislation, which gives them four days to remove their ads following the election. According to Juan Manuel Nunez, an Iberoamerican University professor, political publicity this season generated an estimated 10,000 tons of trash in Mexico City alone. Although the banners are labeled as recyclable, it was unclear how many of them were really recycled.
“Although promoted as environmentally friendly, these banners and tarps are usually made from PVC, which can take hundreds of years to break down,” Nunez stated. A TikTok user who became famous for converting the posters into dog beds and refugees who turned them into tents were two more attempts to find new applications for the advertising. ($1 = 18.3900 pesos mexicos)
