Among the fog that clouds the green mountainous landscapes of San Lucas Redención, in the State of Oaxaca, in Mexico, you can see in the distance a group of women who are distinguished by the fluorescent highlights of their dresses. They are Mixtec women from the High Sierra. Silent shepherds who guide the sheep and while they walk their hands are busy with fabrics that they are embroidering. They use the pepenado technique in their dresses, which seem to speak for them. A skill that they have learned from their grandmothers, in which, line by line, they pass the thread with their needle, gathering the white fabric until it turns into an accordion and constructing complex figures.
These women of a thousand colors who find a rhythm in their fabric while they pilgrimage through the mountains carry on the fronts of their blouses a fauna of deer, goats, birds and, on the sleeves, abstract figures of the flora of their land. Everything is embroidered in bright green, burgundy, yellow, orange or Mexican pink backgrounds. The complexity of her technique, which works like an abacus that leaves loose stitches, cannot be explained: they have learned it by knitting, they have taught it by knitting. That rarity, that uniqueness of the textures was what seduced Maria Grazia Chiuri, designer of the Dior house, to work with them on her Cruise 2024 collection, inspired by Mexico.
Marcelina, Victoria, Elízabeth, María Juana, Irma, Virginia, Francisca and Isabel were not going to sell their identity to the renowned French house as so many in the city ventured to reproach them. It was their processes and techniques that were going to dialogue with the designs of wide skirts and smooth tailored jackets of the fashion house. “For the Cruise collection, three figures were used: the orchid, the clover, and a kind of abstract flower,” explains Narcy Morales, a designer who worked leading this group of women and coordinating the entire collaboration process. “The embroiderers know what identifies them as women of the ethnic group to which they belong and they, more than anyone else, protect what they have. Only they can make variations to their knowledge and the shapes of their dresses. But when it comes to working on embroidery for external use by the community, they are very willing to explore challenges,” adds Narcy.
For these Mixtec women, working together with Dior was a route to show the boutiques of the world, the local markets of Tlaxiaco, where they sell, and the Mexican and foreign buyers who visit the patron saint festivals, that the work of embroidering a blouse for three months deserves to be recognized and highly remunerated. Theirs is an art: the landscape is her workshop, the embroidery is her handwriting. A unique expression, impossible to copy, no one piece is the same as the other. Therefore, the equation of her artisanal knowledge with haute couture, which was the great emphasis that Maria Grazia Chiuri wanted to give to this collection, interested them.
“This conversation that we have created between fashion and artisanal knowledge is what can help sustain tradition moving into the future, because there is always the risk that we will lose this knowledge,” said Chiuri in the interview he gave in Mexico prior to his parade. “I am very sensitive to this concern. “I am from southern Italy, where the tradition of passing artisanal knowledge from mother to daughter was lost, because the second generation found other more profitable interests, because artisanal work was seen as something domestic, because hard work was not recognized,” explained the designer, who on her exploratory trip through Mexico also worked with the Nahua weaver Hilan Cruz Cruz, with the expert in the chain technique Sodelva Espinoza Gutiérrez and with Antonia Gómez Velazco, who has been working with the backstrap loom for decades.
Remigio Mestas, a weaver from another part of Oaxaca, from the Villa Hidalgo Yalalag region, and who has been working for 30 years for the preservation of textiles in Mexico, perfectly understands the fear that motivates Chiuri to travel the world making visible some of the more hidden and ancestral weaving knowledge.
He himself has been forced to stop using the loom he inherited from his mother to go out and create opportunities that allow the fabrics of hundreds of communities to represent an income and, in the meantime, be preserved. “As a child I saw my mother spend two months weaving a huipil on her backstrap loom, go to the town market and see that no one paid her the price she asked for. If she asked for 1,000 pesos, they offered her 100. She had to leave it to the highest bidder and wait for them to pay her in installments on market days. The solution she adopted was to buy ready-made fabric and just embroider it. But that was losing his art, giving up on it,” explains the artisan, who today works with 42 communities in Oaxaca and eight others throughout Mexico. “The commitment to these 400 families is that textiles remain current and increasingly valued.”
Remigio was in charge of coordinating the weaving of four huipils for Dior’s Cruise 2024 collection, which collected the weaving, embroidery and dyeing knowledge of the Zapotecs of San Blas Atempa, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Chinantecs of the Papaloapan Basin , National Valley. “When Dior approached us for this collaboration, we set three conditions that were non-negotiable: the first, honor to whom honor is due, that is, giving credit for each of the garments to the community and the weaver who had worked on them. . Second, a fair price for the work we were going to do and, finally, the clarity that the community’s identity is not for sale,” explains the weaver, who is clear that the textiles that the communities make for foreigners can afford. variations and changes in the warp and weft, for example, weaving them looser so that the fabric has more movement.
In the land of Remigio it is said that the huipil was born from the goddess of the thirteen snakes, a divinity that emerged when the conquistadors cut down a copal tree to build a church. The striping on the shoulders of the huipil, the coral on the chest (a type of plume) and the line at the end embroidered in colors still have the power to represent these snakes. The sacred breath of this garment has managed to remain current within the community, despite the fact that they have been selling their fabrics to foreigners for decades.
Beyond the conversation that this collaboration with Dior has sparked, Remigio Mestas and the communities with which he worked are clear that, in a country like Mexico, which has suffered so much from plagiarism and appropriation at the hands of famous fashion brands, “ This is a route” that fashion must follow to work with artisans. “Today the mestizos of Oaxaca and Mexico already wear huipil. When I was a child and went to sell what my mother knitted, many told me that it looked like a sack of potatoes. This rejection is still valid today, because many despise the clothing of indigenous peoples and their textiles. But after working with Dior, those who had not yet decided now dare because they realized that what we do is on par with what the best in the world do,” Mestas concludes.
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