Period Power

Petra Collins released Period Power through The Ardorous - a white t-shirt printed with a hairy vulva, fake blood spattered across the chest. It was deliberately, unambiguously obscene, and the fact that you could actually buy it felt impossible.

This was when feminist art was still figuring out how to exist in the mainstream, when nobody quite knew what to do with someone who refused to soften the edges. Collins didn’t make menstruation inspirational or educational. She just printed it on cotton and made it look brutally, unapologetically sexual. American Apparel distributed it - the company that had made a whole brand out of sexual provocation - and somehow this felt like the most transgressive thing they’d ever done, because it was sincere.

I think about the architecture of shame around menstruation. The discreet packaging, the blue liquid in tampon ads, the entire apparatus built to make you hide something your body does without asking. And here’s Collins, just printing it, making it impossible to look away or pretend it’s something else. Not clever. Not subtle. Just a refusal.

The design itself was crude in the best way - anatomically blunt, indifferent to whether you wanted to look at it. There’s something in that refusal that matters, not because menstruation is a political statement, but because we’ve spent so long hiding it that showing it plainly feels dangerous. And you could buy it. Available to anyone.

I never wore one. Still don’t know if I would. But I got it immediately - the gesture, the clarity, the refusal to soften it into something palatable. It was about the simple fact that bodies do what they do, and pretending otherwise costs something.