Agatha Ruiz de La Prada in a love letter to the country on the first day of Portugal Fashion | report
next to catwalk improvised outside the National Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Porto, the curious stop, while the models dressed by Katty Xiomara parade. This Wednesday the show of the 51st edition of Portugal Fashion opened on a day highlighting the return of Maria Gambina, the declaration of Maria Carlos Baptista, in addition to the debut of Agatha Ruiz De La Prada at Invicta. “For me, Portugal is brutally important. I am very content, this show is very important”, the Spanish creator confesses to PÚBLICO.
In the museum rooms, botany or zoology divisions geologically gave the behind-the-scenes collection to the hustle and bustle of a fashion week. Minutes before the parade Katty Xiomara, as a model initially to be dressed, while, beside, Maria Gambina the last test. Fashion came to inhabit emblematic spaces of the city, in an edition that the organization called “commitment”. At the end of the afternoon, the atmosphere will lighten up with the announcement, following a meeting with the Minister of Economy, that the next edition should be assured.
But that’s not what the designers are thinking of getting started before the runway show of work the past few months overwhelms concerns. Katty Xiomara marked the run with a reflection, Advertising, which happened to be adequate to ponder the moment that humanity. “Actually, an advertisement is born long before what we know as such. We can even associate it with religion. Or, on the other hand, it comes from the word propagate”, begins by explaining the Venezuelan creator.
“But propaganda is also associated with totalitarian regimes – which makes sense to mention it today”, he argues, referring to the regime of Vladimir Putin. Many of the totalitarian regimes that mark history “are born of a good idea”: “It is almost a utopia for a better world that ends up becoming a dystopia.” This is the path she takes in the fashion show, to the sound of DJ Freud, where the dream gives way to advertising, with a military allusion in the models’ accessories and in the way they walk.
In the pieces, in contrast to the regimes that want to “uniform society”, Katty Xiomara promotes individuality and surprises with the sensuality of lace, transparencies, leaves and bows, in soft, feminine colors. “The idea was to contradict formulas”, assert some. As a form of social criticism, the main stamp reads “blah, blah, blah”.
Thirty years of Gambina
Maria Gambina return to PF after being absent in the last edition. He did not attend because he does not want to present “more collections six months in advance”. And he justifies to the PUBLIC: “It doesn’t make sense for my business to make this investment of having a collection for six months stopped in my studiobecause I only sell in my physical store and online store.”
“I’m 30 years into my career and I fought so hard. I have to get my head around that this is really a business,” she confesses. “I no longer make pieces for museums or to have more pieces”, he says, as if in a declaration of interests. This is what defines a proposal that inhabited the Passeio dos Clérigos, with a privileged view of the city’s icon.
There was no lack of the football universe that he often brings to his collections, he presents them in various meshes, in fun elements. But for this winter, he brings something new: he discovered the universe of reggae. “This collection is a collection of everything I live, hear and see. I saw a documentary about reggae and then listened to the 20 best reggae albums”, he says. “I started to discover a lesser known side of this music. And the message is all peace and love – it’s what we need today.”
In one, the neon proposal drew attention, bet on colorful knits and gangs, as well as on waterproofs. “I worked the laser print on the denim. It was a good challenge. I like to try new things. Maria Gambina is not a formula,” she declares.
Maria Carlos Baptista’s utilitarian clothes
Maria Carlos Baptista The Bloom contest in 2020 and since then has gained prominence among the new creators of PF, in an approach that both oscillates between the experimental, and is distinguished by the passion for tailoring. “I felt the need to return to the utilitarian question. When I went into fashion, I wanted to be a tailor”, says the former ballerina. “In this collection I made pieces by instinct, I didn’t think about the set”, she reveals.
This instinctive dimension, believed, “gives depth to the pieces”. But this time, the depth does not prevent them from being commercial and that was their objective. In the parade at the São Bento da Vitória Monastery, she brought out the best she knows how to do in the contrast between masculine tailoring and delicate satin dresses, combined with the ships of the Lage ─ all made with materials at home, even to fight waste.
“Always this differentiating charm can be offered by being mine. I will not bring a new world,” she notes. But after months of putting together a collection, entirely for her clothes, unaided seeing the mannequins in her clothes “is a feeling of well-deserved break”, she says with emotion. “I materialized things in dance, now I materialize in clothes”, summarizes the young woman, who left the dance after an injury.
Maria Carlos Baptista’s debut in men’s clothing is coming soon, in her dream of “tailoring”. Now, it wants to try to scale the production of some pieces on this path to assert itself as a brand, in addition to fashion as an experimental art. At the same time, she aims to make more and more exclusive pieces, “to create a link between creator and client”.
a core made in portugal by Agatha Ruiz de La Prada
Per annum, Agatha Ruiz de La Prada he does an average of 70 shows, but few are as special as this one, he confesses to the PUBLIC, sitting in the front row of the fashion show room, where in a few moments he will fill the room with color, before an audience in ecstasy to receive it. “It’s very exciting to be in the north, admit it, about the first parade – the south is already here for the show”,
It is in this part of the country that, for 30 years, he has produced 90% of his collections. “It was El Corte Inglès that brought me here. It presents me as the first factories, in Riba de Ave, and we wait forever”, he recalls. What is the advantage of continuing to produce in Portugal? “The Portuguese factories are much better than the Spanish ones. For many years, Spanish women were asked to make an alliance and at least two thousand of each color. In Portugal I said 50 and I said 50”, he revives.
The Spanish designer praises the evolution of the Portuguese textile industry, which she sees being improved “every day”. “For example, Inditex is Spanish, but a lot of production is Portuguese,” she argues. And she laments: “From my point of view, the Government here gives much more facilities than in Spain. It’s a shame, because when I was little, there were a lot of factories in Spain. They all closed.”
But the night was one of celebration and color. For the show, the designer, who stands out for her fashion inspired by pop art, brought the best of its commercial collection, made in Portugal, with some author pieces in ecological materials. “Almost all the pieces I bring are made with plane trees, with bamboo, with algae. It’s the most ecological collection I’ve made in my life”, he summarizes. Now, he celebrates, it is possible to be “ecological and also very happy”, since before “recycling fabrics were very sad”.
Highlight for a dramatic white dress with layers or the creation that closed the show: a pink dress full of volumes. All models wore the classic heart of Agatha Ruiz de La Prada on their heads. It was almost a proof of love for Portugal: “For me, Portugal is brutally important.” And the designer does not shy away from praising the national fashion that she follows closely, especially thanks to her friends Ana Salazar, Miguel Vieira and Fátima Lopes. “Intellectual fashion here is extraordinary, extraordinarily more so than in Spain.”
This Thursday, fashion continues to inhabit the city with the fashion shows of young talents at Escola Superior Artística do Porto and the final of the Bloom Contest, at Alfândega, as well as presentations by Lilly Afonso, Nopin, Nuno Miguel Ramos, David Tlale and o Footwear for shoes and for the Portuguese, promoted by the Portuguese Association of Footwear Manufacturers, Components, Leather Goods and Substitutes (APICCAPS).