Costa Rica Entertainment – Miss Costa Rica is having a bit of a wardrobe crisis.
With just 12 days to go before the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, 21-year-old Karina Ramos has been stripped of her national costume after the Costa Rican government determined that its design, adorned with Costa Rica’s coat of arms, was an inappropriate use of a national symbol.
Citing a starchy 1906 law regulating the proper use of national symbols and other matters of early 20th century probity, the Foreign Ministry’s Office of Protocol called dressmaker Daniel Moreira to inform him that the “fantasy gown” he stitched for Miss Costa Rica was bordering on illegal.
A spokesman from the Foreign Ministry told Fusion that it was more of a courtesy call to remind the designer about the law. He said making a dress resembling the tricolor of Costa Rican flag is fine, but incorporating the national seal is a stitch too far.
Moreira, with a sigh of resignation and a bit of frustrated muttering, agreed to make Miss Costa Rica a new dress and get it shipped up to Doral, Florida before next week’s pageant.
But in an interview with Costa Rican daily La Nacion, Moreira defended the original dress design as a “modern vision” of patriotism, without all the kitsch of frogs and bird feathers and other tawdry design elements that typically go into national gowns from tropical latitudes. People that don’t know fashion should keep their opinions to themselves, he sniffed.
“I’m not a soccer fan, so I have no reason to criticize soccer players because I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Moreira told La Nacion, “Why do people get so easily worked up about something that they shouldn’t have any opinion on because they are not experts?”
By TIM ROGERS http://fusion.net/
