THE PEOPLE'S PRESIDENT INSIDE THE RISE OF CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM

The former activist and climate scientist is now one of the world's most popular democratically elected leaders. Has Mexico's president stayed true to her ideals?

- BY RACHEL NOLAN

THE PRESIDENT’S DRESSMAKER works at home, down a narrow road in a working-class neighbourhood on the southernmost edge of Mexico City. In the brightly lit, pink-walled room at the back of her modest house, Olivia Trujillo sits at her sewing machine, piecing together the president’s signature suits and dresses. Trujillo sews everything here. Once finished, an assistant spirits away the items by motorcycle straight to the National Palace, where the president lives. Claudia Sheinbaum’s clothing - tailored from modest fabrics produced in Mexico and featuring Indigenous motifs - is one of the many ways that her administration communicates its slogan: “For the good of all, first the poor.”

The dressmaker has just one problem with the president. People who wear made-to-measure clothes normally sit for the tailor twice: first, to have their measurements taken, then a second time for final adjustments. “Not once has she done a fitting for me, never!” says Trujillo, an exacting and neatly turned-out woman in her 60s. She knows the president is busy. “Still,” she objects, “any normal woman does a fitting for important clothes, like their wedding dress.”

Trujillo designed and sewed both the president’s wedding dress for her recent remarriage to an old college flame (reconnected through Facebook, no fitting) and the bell-sleeved dress for her 2024 inauguration as president (landslide victory, no fitting). For the inauguration, the dress was pearl-coloured, with tiny embroidered flowers on the skirt. Trujillo made two identical versions, “in case someone threw tomatoes or something. There are bad people out there!”