In January 2013 the picture of a French soldier stationed in Mali whose face was covered with a scarf with sinister skull features and protective goggles appeared on several newspapers and online outlets; a scandal quickly ensued. The French army declared in the newspaper Libération that such behavior was unacceptable and that the image was not representative of France’s actions in Mali, which at that time were trying to regain control of the country from forces associated with al Qaeda. I saw the picture in Lecturas dominicales and immediately thought that such an emblematic image of the intervention of the european colonial powers in Africa has seldom emerged; it was scandalous precisely because of the relations it evoked with such ease.

As it turned out the skull motif had been popular for some years in informal wear, mostly because of its relation to the Mexican holiday of the Día de Muertos. By 2010-2011 it had already figured in the collections of Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood. Some commentators speculated that one of the possible inspirations for the french soldier’s attire was a character of the video game Call of Duty that sports a very similar combination of skull face-mask and goggles. Suddenly the skull shed its traditional religious and metaphysical meanings to become the expression of a genuine aesthetics of colonization, death and terror.

A year later, while walking through a shopping mall, I came across an advertising for Marc Jacobs’ fall 2014 campaign. In it appeared a series of young models with colorful outfits inspired by motocross fashion and the contours of old video game consoles. The word “revolution” appeared in some of the garments. But there was one of the pictures that stood out from the rest: it was a girl with pink braided hair with her nose and mouth covered by a skull scarf. One of the most politically charged images of recent years had gone from pop culture to a battlefield and from there to a haute couture fashion show. The image of the skull had gone full circle: it had been secularized, branded for prêt-à-porter turned into an emblem of domination to finally reappear on the catwalks as an unwitting expression of death and terror. A sign of the times.