Barragán

I think it would have landed completely differently outside ‘Mexican territory’. The Mexican Embassy in Berlin became a kind of international liminal space; a fragment of Mexico in Europe where the concept could become reality. We had been considering this presentation since our show at AIFA, Mexico City’s new airport, in September 2023. We waited until the transition felt right: me dressed as Charles Manson, handcuffed at the airport, extradited to Europe, and finally showing inside the Embassy. It completed the story I had already made in my head.
Tor Studio was essential in translating that narrative into architecture. Rather than treating the Embassy as a neutral venue, they worked with its spatial, institutional, and symbolic character, creating a dialogue between the collection and the building. Their architectural vision and support on the ground in Berlin allowed the space itself to become part of the story.

I’m an artist who uses clothing as a medium. Some people understand it, and some don’t. That tension is part of the work.

I resist the idea that a designer has to become a spokesperson. Identity is not a press release, and a community is never one coherent thing. I can speak from where I stand and from what I have lived, but I do not want that experience to become a formula for representing everybody else. The work should make room for contradiction, desire and even discomfort. The moment I am expected to explain an entire culture, the person disappears and only the label remains.

Clothing becomes fiction as soon as it proposes a life beyond the body wearing it. A garment can suggest a history, a social position, a fantasy or a threat. I’m interested in the instant when a look stops behaving like a product and begins behaving like a person you think you recognise. The character doesn’t need a complete biography; the gaps matter because the audience fills them with their own prejudice and desire.

I wanted the collection to feel like a collision between people who would not normally occupy the same room. Some characters are grotesque, some are seductive, and some move between the two. I’m less interested in issuing a moral verdict than in exposing how quickly we read a body through clothing: who appears respectable, dangerous, ridiculous or desirable. The clownish gestures make those social performances visible. They exaggerate what is already there.
We also made a version that says, “Welcome to Mexico. Now You Speak English.” The other garments and the rest of the full collection will be released in September. We created ninety-five looks, but because the Embassy is both a diplomatic institution and an architecturally significant space, we made a curatorial decision not to present certain looks in that context. It was important to respect the nature of the building without compromising the collection, which will be shown in full in September.

Yes, the ambiguity is conscious. Camp loses its force when it becomes only an inside joke, and sincerity can become sentimental when it’s protected from ridicule. I often begin with something I genuinely love and push it until it becomes unstable. Mockery and celebration can coexist in the same look. That uncertainty asks more from the viewer than a clear instruction about what is tasteful or correct.

I’m suspicious of how Chicano culture has become the dominant visual shorthand for Mexico abroad. It can turn an enormous, contradictory country into a cartoon and make a specifically Mexican-American experience stand in for every Mexican experience. I don’t deny the reality or importance of that ‘culture’, but its proximity to the United States gives it access to media, language and cultural platforms that people creating from Mexico do not encounter in the same way. That is a form of privilege, even when it exists alongside discrimination.
For me, disruption means refusing to perform the version of Mexican identity that an international audience already knows how to consume. I’m not interested in proving that so-called bad taste can become acceptable once it has been polished for a Western gaze. I would rather question who gets to define Mexico in the first place and why some images travel more easily than others.

I suppose I need to embrace my French background somehow. XD

Fashion has become very fluent in the language of risk while growing increasingly afraid of actual risk. A great deal of provocation now arrives already explained, branded and made safe for circulation. Politeness is not the problem by itself; predictability is. I want fashion to leave room for something that can’t be resolved immediately into approval or outrage — that’s what we encounter in our day-to-day lives.

Fashion rarely changes a mind through an argument. It changes what a person can imagine seeing in public. A body, a gender or a kind of beauty can move from unthinkable to familiar through repetition and desire. That power is limited and easily absorbed by commerce, but it’s still real. Fashion can shift the image before society finds the words.

I’m Mexican, so I don’t reject the label. I reject the assumption that the label explains the work. It often becomes a demand for recognisable symbols, as if nationality were an aesthetic category with a fixed palette and vocabulary. Mexico is part of my perspective, not a theme I apply to a collection. I want the freedom to be specific without being reduced to a national costume.

Constantly. Exoticism is a way of looking without having to understand. It rewards whatever appears colourful, excessive, sensual or politically legible while ignoring work that doesn’t confirm those expectations. The answer is not to make the work neutral. It is to remain specific enough to resist being converted into a generic idea of Latin America.

I left the city when it was still called Distrito Federal, D.F. By the time I was able to return a few years later, it had become Ciudad de México, CDMX, and now, increasingly, Mexico City. That shift in names reflects something of my own relationship with the city: it remains familiar, yet at the same time it feels like a different place.
Gentrification has made that relationship both more protective and more conflicted. I still love the city’s capacity for transformation, but transformation is not innocent when access to the city is determined by wealth. These days, my main reason for returning is to visit my family. I feel somewhat disconnected from the city itself, yet strangely connected to the wider world through my phone. It may sound odd, but the digital era shapes so much of our daily experience that I now find my strongest sense of home in food, family, and the closeness we share.

I keep returning to the moment when someone tries to become acceptable and something unruly remains visible: sexuality, class, vanity, aggression, humour. Clothes promise control, but the body always interrupts. I don’t think I want to resolve that tension. It’s where the characters begin. Fiction always mesmerises me.