frowning, mats and, of course, a yellow wax. The garment of sailors is inseparable from the image of Greta Thunberg in the media. Its remanence has made it a totem of the “climate generation” from which a number of messages are emitted which contribute to defining the political identity that the young Swedish activist embodies.
The presence of yellow wave within the Thunbergian wardrobe indisputably proceeds from a form of spontaneity. The youth of northern Europe, which is also the most engaged in ecological fights, fluently bears the yellow wax without it having until then been synonymous with particular activism. This garment which smells of hiking and is intended by definition to outdoor activities – preferably under showers – suggests the existence of a strong link, of a proven sensitivity to what affects nature and its preservation. Difficult not to subside behind the Greta Thunberg light habit, which is therefore also a rain habit, a subliminal allusion to strong precipitation, stigma among others of climate change.
Also as implicitly, the yellow wax suggests in his wake a form of manifest dramatization. Formerly present in comedy as an element of panoply synonymous with carelessness – let us sing in the rain (1952), Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, or the umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Jacques Demy – This raincoat has become permeable to the severity of the subject he endorses. Its original reason for being, it must be remembered, is to protect the sailor from the elements, but also, and that is why it is bright yellow, to more easily identify in the waves a man who fell in the sea.
Transgression signal
More broadly, the wax of Greta Thunberg sends us back to a color that finds a particular echo in the time. Against the backdrop of bitterness and disenchantment, the yellow expresses the collective alert, the dispute, even anger, which is exploding off the institutional beaten track. Color unidentified politically and rather poorly loved (it has long been associated with cheating or deception) to the point that few people make it their favorite nuance, yellow stands out as an antisystem transgression signal. Like the vests of the challenge born in France in October 2018.
The yellow is therefore wonderfully at the waxed of Greta Thunberg, a pro-climate teenager emerges from nowhere to challenge the world of adults without bigging. For its generation, the time is no longer a tender green of well-wise ecolos or the blue of the commercial recovery of ecology, but with raging yellow, an expression of a feeling of urgency or even omnipotence. The conviction pegged to the wax to be right against the rulers and the baby boomers.
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