Guatemala-born Designer Links Culture with Fashion Show Trends

Guatemalan artist Elena de Leon walks the runway durning fashion show featuring her Guatemalan textiles, Friday, May 12, 2023, in Brownsville, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Guatemalan artist Elena de Leon walks the runway durning fashion show featuring her Guatemalan textiles, Friday, May 12, 2023, in Brownsville, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
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Guatemala-born Designer Links Culture with Fashion Show Trends

Guatemalan artist Elena de Leon walks the runway durning fashion show featuring her Guatemalan textiles, Friday, May 12, 2023, in Brownsville, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Guatemalan artist Elena de Leon walks the runway durning fashion show featuring her Guatemalan textiles, Friday, May 12, 2023, in Brownsville, Texas. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

A Guatemala-born designer combined Indigenous weaving technique, modern clothing design and colorful history from her native country in a recent runway showcase in Brownsville, Texas. The display offered a taste not only of Elena De León’s artistic vision, but of work by Guatemalan mothers, including some in the US and others who remained at home to support their families.

The Costumes of the Americas Museum in the border city hosted the May 12 event with assistance from the Guatemalan Consulate in nearby McAllen and Maryland, where De León lives after migrating to the US seven years ago.

“I’m a woman thinking of the needs of her community and Guatemalan towns,” De León told the crowd before models wearing clothes made by Guatemalan women sashayed down the runway, The Associated Press reported.

Applause, cheers and intermittent flashes from photos were heard throughout the fashion show as women, children and men walked to fast-tempo music while in deep red, woven fabric often displaying intricate designs adorning a woman’s top, skirt or a man’s vest.

“Every single one of their textiles tell a story. A color has a significance, and each one of the regions, too,” said Rosario Ovando, Guatemala’s consul in McAllen.

About 200 women of Guatemalan descent living in the US or in their home country work with De León to sell their products and keep a personal duty.
“Women are also the ones that carry the culture, that carry the language. They carry the traditions,” Ovando said. “There’s a lot of tradition in our country and a lot of women that have this magic in their hands.”



Activists Return Macron Waxwork Stolen from Paris Museum 

A photo shows a wax statue of French President Emmanuel Macron, stolen the day before from the Grevin Museum, during an action by Greenpeace environmental activists outside the EDF headquarters in Paris on June 3, 2025. (AFP)
A photo shows a wax statue of French President Emmanuel Macron, stolen the day before from the Grevin Museum, during an action by Greenpeace environmental activists outside the EDF headquarters in Paris on June 3, 2025. (AFP)
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Activists Return Macron Waxwork Stolen from Paris Museum 

A photo shows a wax statue of French President Emmanuel Macron, stolen the day before from the Grevin Museum, during an action by Greenpeace environmental activists outside the EDF headquarters in Paris on June 3, 2025. (AFP)
A photo shows a wax statue of French President Emmanuel Macron, stolen the day before from the Grevin Museum, during an action by Greenpeace environmental activists outside the EDF headquarters in Paris on June 3, 2025. (AFP)

Greenpeace activists overnight Tuesday to Wednesday returned a wax figure of President Emmanuel Macron they had stolen from a Paris museum as part of a protest against French economic ties with Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.

After taking the waxwork from the Grevin Museum in a carefully planned heist on Monday the campaigners had placed it outside the Russian embassy in a symbolic protest.

Carrying on the action late on Tuesday, they placed the waxwork, estimated to be worth 40,000 euros ($45,500), in a chest and put it outside the headquarters of French electricity giant EDF.

They also put the statue on its feet and stood next to it a sign with a slogan denouncing Macron for not completely cutting ties with Russia under Vladimir Putin, in particular in the energy sphere.

"Putin-Macron radioactive allies," it said.

Police then arrived and secured the chest and waxwork ahead of its return to the Grevin Museum, the Paris equivalent of Madame Tussauds in London.

"We came to bring back the statue of Emmanuel Macron because, as we said from the start, we had just borrowed it," Jean-Francois Julliard, executive director of Greenpeace France, told AFP at the scene.

"We notified both the management of the Grevin Museum and the police. It's up to them to come and retrieve it," he said.

The choice of the EDF headquarters was "to make Macron face up to his responsibilities concerning the trade that is maintained with Russia, particularly in the nuclear sector," he added.

According to Julliard, French companies can still, despite the sanctions regime in place since the invasion, "import a whole host of products from Russia" including enriched uranium to power French nuclear power plants, natural uranium transiting through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan via Russia, LNG and chemical fertilizers.

He said Greenpeace particularly criticized the surge in Russian fertilizer imports into the EU, which rose some 80 percent between 2021 and 2023 according to French fertilizer manufacturers.

According to a police source, two women and a man on Monday entered the Grevin Museum posing as tourists and, once inside, changed their clothes to pass for workers. The activists slipped out through an emergency exit with the waxwork.

A museum spokeswoman acknowledged that "they had clearly done their research very thoroughly".