Carla Fernández

Carla Fernández has run her house from Mexico City since 2000, and she is a historian as much as a designer. Her method is not borrowed from Indigenous Mexican dress so much as built inside its logic, and the house’s own description of it is the one worth reading: “Mexican indigenous clothing results from the joining together of square and rectangular panels. It’s a unique textile origami that uses these two figures as the base from which to construct any other form using folds, pleats and stitching.” She calls it la raíz cuadrada, the square root. A garment made this way is folded and seamed rather than cut to a curve, so the panel the loom produced survives into the finished piece instead of being carved out of it.

The work is done with artisan cooperatives across Mexico through Taller Flora, a workshop that travels. It goes to the weavers, embroiderers, and dyers at their invitation, and the designing happens with them rather than after them. The techniques the house names are backstrap-loom weaving, natural dyeing, embroidery, ikat, and palm weave. Its collaborators are overwhelmingly women, many of them the heads of their households, and its stated practice is to record with every piece the community and the techniques that made it. Fernández received the Prince Claus Award in Amsterdam in 2013, and the company has held B Corporation certification since 2018.

Her line for the whole project is short: “To be original is to go back to the origin.” The work is shown as often as it is sold. Carla Fernández Casa de Moda: A Mexican Fashion Manifesto ran at the Denver Art Museum in 2022, and L’Avenir Fait Main followed at La Galerie du 19M in Paris. Santa Fe met her before either of them. In 2016 she was among the artists in SITElines.2016: much wider than a line at SITE Santa Fe, where she showed quechquemitls made with Tzotzil, Otomí, Amuzgo, Nahua, and Zapotec weavers, hung so that the people looking at them could take them down and put them on. She has since come back to the city for the International Folk Art Market.

Carla Fernández at W Department

The selection is women’s, and it leans to the garments where the geometry is legible. Capas and ponchos first, because a poncho is the square root stated plainly: a panel with an opening in it, and every other decision being about how the panel falls. Then shirts, coats, a saco, tunics, skirts, and trousers, a number of them embroidered by hand. The names are places and figures rather than styles. Chilapa is in Guerrero, Chenalhó is in Chiapas, Chicomecóatl is the Nahua goddess of maize, and Meztli is the moon.

We carry the house because it answers a question Santa Fe asks constantly and that very little clothing answers honestly, which is what it looks like when a garment carries a place without dressing up as it. Nothing in this work is a motif printed onto a blank. The construction is the tradition, and the embroidery belongs to the person who embroidered it.

Continue Exploring

• All Carla Fernández. Capas, ponchos, shirts, coats, skirts, and trousers.
• KUON. A Tokyo house working from boro, the Japanese practice of patching indigo cotton layer over layer. The same argument about inherited technique, arrived at from the other side of the world.
• Nicholas Daley. Named cloths, registered tartans, and a designer who tells you who wove them.
• Getting Dressed as a Creative Act. Our writing on dressing as composition rather than as errand.
• The Fabric Care Guide. How to look after hand-woven cloth, natural dyes, linen, and wool.
• The Library. Our writing on the houses we carry, plus the monthly playlist.
• Visit W Department. 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza, open daily, 11 to 5.

Shop Carla Fernández

Womenswear, with the capas and ponchos at the center of it.