Global stages like the Super Bowl halftime show or the Olympic opening ceremony are often framed as spectacle: entertainment stripped of context. Yet when culture is deployed deliberately, these platforms become sites of power, places where history, labour and identity are asserted rather than diluted.
Two recent examples illustrate this clearly: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show and Stella Jean’s designs for Haiti’s Olympic uniforms. In both cases, clothing and symbolism functioned not as ornament, but as narrative strategy.
Land, Labour, Rhythm
At the Super Bowl, watched by more than 100 million viewers, Bad Bunny centred the pava, a palm-woven straw hat historically worn by Puerto Rico’s jíbaros, the rural farmers and sugarcane workers of the island’s interior.
The pava is inseparable from agricultural labour, survival and working-class life. Outside Puerto Rico, it is often romanticised or reduced to folklore. On the world’s most visible entertainment stage, Bad Bunny reframed it as contemporary cultural language.
Working-class culture is not peripheral. It belongs at the centre of global visibility.
The moment didn’t come from nowhere. The pava has run through Bad Bunny’s recent work, from the imagery of his 2025 album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, a love letter to Puerto Rico, to his landmark residency on the island. At the Super Bowl, that story reached the whole world.
The pava also shaped the musical logic of the performance, framing the roots of bomba and plena. Bomba grew from the traditions of enslaved Africans on Puerto Rico’s sugar plantations; plena emerged in the early 20th century among working-class communities in Ponce. Both belong to a wider Puerto Rican culture woven from African, Indigenous Taíno and Spanish heritage, shaping its rhythms, its communal traditions and its relationship to the land.
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Labour
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Rhythm
ONE LINEAGE, NOT SEPARATE AESTHETICS
The visual of dancers wearing pavas widened that frame, linking agricultural labour to the music that grew from it. Land, labour and rhythm were presented as a single lineage.
Made by Hand
The moment carried a material message too. Traditionally hand-woven from renewable palm leaves, the pava foregrounds sustainable, place-based making. In an era of synthetic fashion and fast production, its visibility quietly challenged the norm, showing that biodegradable materials and human skill can carry as much cultural force as luxury branding or technological spectacle, especially when rooted in living tradition.
A Few Metres of Cloth
A similar strategy shaped Haiti’s Olympic uniforms. Haiti’s very presence at the Winter Olympics disrupts assumptions about geography and belonging in winter sport. The country only made its Winter Games debut in Beijing in 2022, with alpine skier Richardson Viano. Designer Stella Jean treated that presence as intentional visibility rather than novelty. She has described the uniform as “a few meters of cloth” tasked with carrying Haiti’s entire history: revolution, diaspora and resilience.
The Original Design
The original uniform featured Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, the uprising that made Haiti, in 1804, the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people.
Shortly before the ceremony, the International Olympic Committee ruled the image a breach of its rules on political symbolism. With little time and no extra budget, Jean had to redesign the uniforms days before their debut.
Rule 50 · The Olympic Charter
Rule 50 bars political, religious or racial demonstrations and propaganda at Olympic venues. Its aim is neutrality, but it also raises a harder question: when a nation’s history is itself an act of resistance, where does identity end and politics begin?
Rather than erase meaning, Jean adapted. Louverture’s figure was removed, but the red horse, drawn from the work of Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, remained, carrying the idea of revolutionary motion and endurance.
History continues, even when figures are censored.
The Headwrap
The women’s uniforms followed the same logic, reclaiming the headwrap. Worn with gold hoop earrings, it became a statement of pride and elegance, transforming a symbol once tied to restriction into one of self-definition and continuity.
The History of the Tignon
In 1786, Spanish colonial Louisiana passed the so-called tignon laws, requiring free women of colour to cover their hair, an attempt to mark them as lower in status and dim their visibility.
Women answered with defiance, wrapping their heads in rich fabrics and jewels and turning the tignon into a symbol of beauty and pride. Across the Caribbean, including Haiti’s own mouchwa tèt, the headwrap carries a similar story of restriction reclaimed.
These uniforms were never about medals. Amid political instability, migration and humanitarian crisis, they worked as cultural soft power. Rather than centring narratives of collapse or deficit, they projected dignity, historical agency and continuity, offering the world an image of Haiti grounded in revolution, making and self-representation.
Storytelling That Survives
What connects these two moments is restraint as much as boldness. Neither relied on slogans or overt messaging. Instead, they trusted audiences to read symbols embedded in material culture: hats, headwraps, silhouettes, colour. This is how storytelling survives regulation and spectacle.
Culture as Power
Identity as Authorship
On the world’s most mediated stages, identity is often simplified for consumption. These interventions resisted that flattening by keeping labour, land and lineage visible, proving that culture moves forward even when its figures are constrained.
They were not just moments of fashion or performance, but demonstrations of culture as power at scale, showing how storytelling endures when identity is treated as authorship, not aesthetic.
