At the Golden Globes, attendees drew attention to the Time’s Up initiative by wearing all black and donning lapel pins with the phrase on it. For the upcoming Grammys, celebrities are being encouraged to wear white roses in solidarity with the organization, which aims to fight sexual harassment in the workplace across all industries through advocacy and a legal-defense fund. Members from Time’s Up, which was founded by 300 actresses, wrote a letter to their music-industry colleagues asking them to join the movement by sporting a symbolic rose. “As we are inspired by the #timesup campaign, we are encouraging the artists that we work with and our colleagues attending the 60th Annual Grammy Awards in New York City to wear a white rose to the ceremony on Sunday, January 28th,” it says in the letter. “We choose the white rose because historically it stands for hope, peace, sympathy and resistance.”
Fans of the extremely popular Hunger Games books and films may have a different association with the lapel rose, though, as it was the preferred accessory of Donald Sutherland’s dictatorial President Snow. His quarters were often adorned with large rose arrangements, and he always wore one on the lapel of his jacket to mask the persistent smell of blood on his breath from the open sores in his mouth. So remember: The Grammys roses are about resistance, and it’s the Hunger Games roses that are symbolic of a repressive tyrant. This has been a public service announcement.
