Walking into ¡Moda Hoy! Latin American and Latinx Fashion Design Today, a new exhibition opening at The Museum at FIT, guests encounter two looks, one by the Colombian designer and 2021 LVMH Prize semi-finalist Kika Vargas, and another by the Mexican-American designer Brenda Equihua. The two garments, a ruffled dress by Vargas and a coat featuring the Virgen de Guadalupe by Equihua, encompass the mission of this new show: to feature both Latin American and Latinx—here used in reference to US born, based, or raised—designers, and to reveal the nuances with which they approach fashion.
Co-curated by the museum’s Tanya Melendez-Escalante and Melissa Marra-Alvarez, the exhibition takes a decentering approach to the idea of Latin American and Latinx fashion. For most of the 20th century, Latin American fashion was exoticized and otherized. ¡Moda Hoy! sets out to prove that there is no homogenous “Latin” aesthetic, but a collective imagination of diverse points of view stemming from a multicultural region. To tell this story, the exhibition features 60 objects from the museum’s collections, many of which were acquired for this show. Though it focuses on the 21st century, it opens with a lineup of influential designers who came to prominence in the 20th century and represent Latin American fashion in the public’s imagination, among them Oscar de La Renta, Isabel Toledo, and Carolina Herrera.
The show has been a long time coming. Twenty years ago, Melendez-Escalante was a graduate student at FIT from Mexico, looking to expand the way in which we study fashion from the region. “We have this huge heritage and we really need to be more specialized in the way we look at clothing and fashion, and not only look at it from the anthropological side,” she said. Her attempts were foiled, the library was almost entirely lacking in texts on the subject. But in a full circle moment, years later, after joining the Museum as a curator, she’s partnered with Marra-Alvarez to conceptualize this show.
“There have been exhibitions on Latin American design or specific designers, but we were amazed to see that there had not been an exhibition that looked at fashion designers’ work and at the region as a whole and its diaspora,” Melendez-Escalante said. The 60 pieces are exhibited thematically based on concepts favored by the designers, from gender and politics to elegance and craft, rather than geographically or chronologically. “It’s a really great way to highlight the diversity in the region,” said Marra-Alvarez, “but also what links these designers together in their work, and the nuances and similarities we’ve identified, which have been eye-opening.”
First comes a section focused on Indigenous heritage, which highlights the influence of native cultures on Latin American fashion today by focusing on collaborative design. The star of this section is a partnership between Guillermo Vargas of the Mexican label 1/8 Takamura and Mixe artisan Paula Pérez Vásquez, who together created the Blusa Cuadro Tlahui, a square-shaped blouse with hand-embroidered motifs.
Opposite the Indigenous pieces is a group focused on pop culture featuring garments that are alternately collaborative (a Carla Fernandez x Adidas soccer jersey) and personal (a Luar dress that serves as designer Raul Lopez’s ode to his aunts and other family matriarchs). This is where the exhibition finds its most impactful message: Latin America and its diaspora contains multitudes, but culturally there is a shared language built on common interests ranging from family and ancestral traditions to sports.
Up next is a bay focusing on gender. “These [garments] expose the ways in which we understand how gender is constructed, for instance how feminity can be weaponized, talked about, or celebrated,” said Melendez-Escalante. In the mix are Mexican designer Bárbara Sanchez-Kane’s satirization of the muscle-obsessed male physique, a dress by Elena Velez that shows “a woman that is both strong and coming apart at the seams,” and a form-fitting evening frock by Narciso Rodriguez that displays a more conventional take on feminine beauty. This section is augmented when placed in dialogue with another examining elegance as a social construct figuring some of the same designers. As a clever summary of the current conversations on intersectionality, the co-curators included a t-shirt with the word “Latinx” printed over an LGBTQ+ Pride rainbow.
The exhibition also explores the way in which politics have become part of the vernacular of Latinx and Latin American designers. While it’s true that the region is plagued by political issues, and that Latinos in the United States have encountered many hurdles, it’s not often that fashion can make an impactful political statement through products. The piece in this section with the strongest message is a “No Human is Illegal” sweatshirt by Willy Chavarria.
Other sections include a study of the relationship between art and fashion, an examination of how Latin American and Latinx designers tackle sustainability, and a reflection on craftsmanship.
Because of the nuanced and wide-reaching nature of the exhibition, the co-curators enlisted an advisory board of industry professionals and created focus groups of FIT students and staff, in addition to hosting a symposium in which they guided conversations related to the themes of the show. The culmination of those dialogues is a book that shares its title with the exhibition, to be published early next year. “This whole project is a decentering where there’s not one single leading voice, but rather a multitude of voices that show there’s different ways of thinking and different ways of doing things,” said Melendez-Escalante.
But conversations like this one are ever evolving, and the co-curators agree that this exhibition, rather than being a culmination, is a beginning. The goal, said Marra-Alvarez, “is to further these ideas as education and inspiration, so that there are more exhibitions and more books, and more designers featured in them.”
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