Information Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. Feb. 4, 2026: After crafting the broadly praised opening ceremony outfits for Staff Haiti on the 2024 Paris Summer season Olympics, Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean is as soon as once more partnering with the island nation — this time to design its uniforms for the 2026 Milan–Cortina Winter Olympics.
Staff Haiti’s Winter Olympics delegation could also be small, however its cultural footprint is something however. The 2026 workforce consists of simply two athletes — Richardson Viano, 23, and Stevenson Savart, 25 — but Jean is making certain their uniforms carry the load of Haitian historical past, identification, and world presence.
In an interview with the Related Press, Jean revealed that her unique designs featured a picture of Toussaint Louverture, the previous enslaved basic who led the revolution that established the world’s first Black republic in 1804.
“We have now a dedication and a accountability to convey a message,” Jean mentioned. “There are a lot of messages on this uniform. There’s a little bit of Haiti’s historical past, there’s a illustration of one of many fathers of the nation — Toussaint Louverture — a person feared by essentially the most highly effective on earth, similar to Napoleon.”
Nevertheless, the Worldwide Olympic Committee flagged the picture as a violation of Olympic guidelines prohibiting political, non secular, or racial propaganda at Olympic venues, forcing Jean and her workforce to remodel the design.
“Guidelines are guidelines and have to be revered, and that’s what we’ve got accomplished,” Jean defined.
Drawing inspiration from a portray by Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, which depicts Louverture driving a pink horse, Jean collaborated with Italian artisans to reinterpret the imagery with out the historic determine. The ultimate uniforms characteristic a placing pink riderless horse set towards a tropical backdrop, with the phrase “Haiti” emblazoned throughout the highest.
Jean additionally designed a ladies’s search for Staff Haiti, incorporating the normal Haitian tignon — a headwrap traditionally imposed on enslaved ladies to cowl their hair, now reclaimed as a logo of resilience and cultural pleasure.
“For us, it will be significant that this horse — his horse, the final’s horse — stays,” Jean mentioned. “It’s the image of Haiti’s presence on the Olympics. In just some meters of cloth, we should focus historical past and which means. This isn’t about stylistic train.”
Haiti’s ambassador to Italy, Gandy Thomas, underscored the broader significance of the second.
“Haiti’s presence on the Winter Olympics is a logo — an announcement, not a coincidence,” Thomas mentioned. “We might not be a winter nation, however we’re a nation that refuses to be confined by expectation. Absence is essentially the most harmful type of erasing.”
Viano, who made historical past as Haiti’s first-ever Winter Olympian on the 2022 Beijing Video games, echoed that sentiment, noting that participation on the worldwide sports activities stage helps counter persistent unfavorable narratives concerning the Caribbean nation.
The second additionally comes amid heightened world consideration on Haitians overseas. Simply days earlier than Haiti’s Winter Olympics look, a federal decide blocked an effort to finish Short-term Protected Standing (TPS) for roughly 350,000 Haitian immigrants dwelling in the USA — a choice celebrated throughout diaspora communities.
Collectively, Jean’s designs and Staff Haiti’s Olympic presence stand as a reminder that illustration — on material, on snow, and on the world stage — stays a robust type of resistance.
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