Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marie-Charlotte Garin has her roots in environmental activism and was elected to national office in her 20s. And, like Ocasio-Cortez, she exploded onto the political scene seemingly overnight. In the few years since her 2022 election to France’s National Assembly, where she serves as the Lyon deputy, Garin has been the driving force behind the country’s adoption of a consent-based definition of rape and, as of this month, abolishing the concept of sex as a marital duty.
Though not as relentlessly visible on social media as Ocasio-Cortez, Garin has been no less deliberate in cultivating her image. On her first day in office, she wore the blue-and-white floral Boden dress that, 10 years prior, had drawn a barrage of sexist comments and whistles from male lawmakers aimed at government minister Cécile Duflot. (The garment was then loaned to the Museum of Decorative Arts, which lent it to Garin for the occasion.) The move was a purposeful nod from Garin to the women who had come before her, and a way to signal her path forward. “It’s [part of the] eco-feminist culture to ask ourselves how we can use imagination and images to send a political message,” she told me over coffee near Paris’s Palais Bourbon, the grand neoclassical structure that houses the National Assembly.
