This weekend actress Yara Shahidi paid homage to a Democratic politician. No, it wasn’t Obama or (either) Clinton, but the living legend, internet-icon Maxine Moore Waters who is one of 12 black women serving on the United States Congress.
Since Sasha Lane and Katy Perry’s stylist Jamie Mizrahi took over at Juicy Couture, she’s been overhauling the brand’s image, and this statement sweatshirt is just the latest example of it. Gone are the days of Paris Hilton shopping on Rodeo Drive in head-to-toe pink velour; now is the era of boundary-pushing Juicy. Following on from the collaboration with Vetements, where the Cali company lent their name, spirit and nostalgic cultural currency to the trend-leading fashion house, Juicy has enlisted the help of poet Cleo Wade. With a hotly tipped New York Fashion Week show coming up, this is the first teaser of what we can expect from Juicy Couture 2.0.
The Black-ish actress wore a monochrome velour hoodie that had a Cleo Wade quote, ‘What Would Maxine Waters Do?’ embroidered on the back in gothic lettering. Waters has held office for over a decade and has had a varied political career, which has included chairing the Congressional Black Caucus and standing up for the residents of South Central LA during the Rodney King riots in 1992. She’s been praised for her lack of filter, notably calling Trump a ‘disgusting, poor excuse of a man’. But it was her recent showdown with the United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin in July of this year that made her go viral.
Mnuchin was testifying before the House Financial Services Committee when he got a taste of the Waters barbed-wire bite. After being called out for his lack of response to a letter the Congresswoman had sent him months earlier, he tried to butter her up with compliments. She was having N-O-N-E of that. Rather than letting him blabber on and fillerbust his way through his interview, Waters turned to the bespectacled Secretary and shut him up saying: ‘I'm reclaiming my time’. Watch the YouTube above in awe and count down the days until we too can pay our dues to Waters with a Juicy hoodie.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.