Mexico’s fashion trend

MEXICO CITY

From a distance, the black woolen jacket created by fashion designer Carla Fernandez looks like a simple, ordinary blazer. The difference is in the details: bright, multicolored dots embroidered on a piece that combines age-old Indian sewing techniques with an innovative, modern cut.

Miss Fernandez, one of six designers at the Local clothing boutique in Mexico City’s trendy Condesa neighborhood, works with women in the southern Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca to create a product that is local in its use of indigenous design but also made for a modern woman who wants something stylish.

“What I wanted to do was to use their methods to do something that was very sexy and very appealing to this market,” she says.

Miss Fernandez is just one of several young talents in Mexico City seeking to make it onto the international fashion stage by offering modern designs with a clear Mexican flavor. The new crop of designers hopes to take advantage of Mexico’s increasingly stabilized economy, which has improved over the past six years during Vicente Fox’s presidency. Designers say their new businesses are finding receptive customers, local and foreign.

“The next step has to be Mexico, in a way,” Miss Fernandez says, noting that Colombia, Brazil and Argentina already have attracted a fair amount of attention.

The designs are found primarily in small boutiques, with department stores continuing to stock European or American clothing. However, events such as Mexico’s growing Fashion Week are giving them a boost. About 30 designers, mostly Mexican, participated in the April show, and at least 40 designers were expected when the four-day event began this fall, says Anna Fusoni, the event’s fashion director.

Miss Fusoni looked for participants who had both a Mexican cultural element and the ability to sell to a mass market, such as Pineda Covalin and Carmen Rion, she says.

“They have to have a focus. They have to have a market,” she says. “It’s global design with a local touch.”

For Miss Fernandez, who did not participate in Fashion Week, local means finding a way to blend age-old sewing techniques with modern style.

Miss Fernandez started to form her style while working at a Mexico City Indian culture museum that has since closed. There she noticed the prominence of squares and rectangles in the clothing of Mesoamerican cultures.

“I thought it could be a great thing to try to explore this concept of making clothing and making fashion,” she says.

Miss Fernandez says she chose to use rectangles because, rather than cutting fabrics, Indian people tear them along the line of the weave, making curves in garments using pleats and darts in the fabric. She took a gently ruffled skirt off the rack and showed how if its stitches were removed, the fabric would relax back into rectangles.

To help make her clothing, Miss Fernandez works with nongovernmental organizations in Chiapas and Oaxaca to organize groups of women in sewing get-togethers that double as public health education seminars. The women work with the designer to develop ideas for each piece, she says. They are paid per item and also can benefit by preserving traditional techniques while making clothes for their own children.

“They are very happy because it’s like making a new story every day,” Miss Fernandez says.

Her typical customers are artists, actresses and others who “dare to dress differently,” she says.

They’re also people who can afford it — that little black jacket is priced at the equivalent of about $240, and the pleated skirt goes for about $120.

In Polanco, another hip and wealthy — if more conservative — part of town, designer Adriana Hans says she also is seeing more interest in Mexican fashion, from both local women and international buyers.

“I feel that Mexico is in a transition,” says Miss Hans, who makes custom-decorated tank tops as co-owner of the small but trendy Wishes line. “There is a really strong change.”

Tucked into a private street-level unit, Wishes’ showroom feels like a young girl’s bedroom. Red, pink, yellow and blue tops hang flat on a light blue wall graced with the company motto, “What you wish is what you get,” in curvy handwriting.

A sister duo, Adriana and Sharon Hans started the business in 2004 with the idea of making hand-decorated tank tops tailored to the tastes of individual customers. They’ve gained popularity with a line of tops that integrate the modern and the traditional using lace, rhinestones and Mexican embroidery. Their tank tops start around the equivalent of $22, and dresses run in the $300 range.

Wishes already has received support from Mexican society magazines, and the sisters have been chosen by Warner Bros. to use the company’s cartoon characters, including Speedy Gonzales and Tweety Bird, on their tank tops, in the same vein as Nicky Hilton’s Tweety Bird clothing line, Adriana Hans says.

Miss Hans says that along with the industry’s improving reputation, consumers are getting more creative with their looks.

“I feel that we were in a more classical phase and now we’re becoming more brave,” she says, adding that her typical client “is looking for the latest.”

That is indeed what customers of the new designers say they want.

At Trend, another boutique nearby, 26-year-old Blanca Garcia says she finds things that are just a little out of the ordinary. “It’s a place where you can find things that everyone else isn’t wearing,” she says.

Like Local, Trend features a group of local designers and also sells goods made with the collaboration of designers and indigenous groups. Both stores are about a year old.

Cata Mont, another designer at Local, says the boutique’s designers cater to women who want something more than the tops, pants and skirts seen in the more conservative areas of town.

“You don’t have to dress like everyone else,” she says.