Designers thinking differently about fabric
In Murcia, Spain, somewhere between 80 and 60 years ago, Mar Ribaudí’s grandfather needed a new pair of shoes. “His family was super poor,” the designer and eponymous founder of Maribaudi tells me, calling over the internet from her Barcelona studio. “He had to learn to make esparto shoes in order to have shoes,” she says, “which is crazy to me!”
Growing up, Ribaudí would often watch her grandfather shaping and weaving the grey-green esparto fibre, “and I wanted to learn, so he taught me”. Esparto grass and its derivatives are commonly used materials in southern Spain due to their strength and flexibility, making sandals, baskets, mats and more. “I have a hard time saying I’m a brand because for me are art pieces. Everything has research and a strong meaning and concept behind it.” A few weeks ago, she finished crafting a pair of thonged esparto shoes, the thick woven grass sole resting on a peach-toned layer of leather atop a short, stacked heel.
“I like to approach things in a deeply personal, sustainable way. It makes it hard to be commercial, or doable, even. But I like to use unconventional materials,” she explains, naming ceramic, wood, leather and thread as those within her current repertoire. “I like to make functional clothes too, but I really value experimentation and novelty.” Many of her materials “are just the things I find, from living my life, travelling, or things someone gives to me. Then I edit them in some way and make something new.”
I ask about how an ongoing series, titled ‘Dirty Buttons’, came to be. As it happens, Ribaudí was sourcing materials near where she lives in Igualada. “They let me go into a storeroom where they had all these buttons and zippers and things. That’s where I found all these antique buttons that had been used for a collection maybe 20 years ago. So I called the series ‘Dirty Buttons’ because that’s how I found them. And I just wanted to use them – buttons are so beautiful! They’re usually used as a functional thing but they’re also just a great embellishment.”
Ribaudi’s emphasis on “creating things rather than selling ” is shared by French designer Céline Breton, who is equally hesitant to classify her work as that of a fashion brand. Instead, it is a “knitting investigation”, her primary interaction with labels (like the Barcelonian Paloma Wool, the London-based Yuzefi, or NYC’s Interior) being as a freelance consultant. “I call it an investigation because it’s more than just experimentation for me. I’m trying to change our conception of knitwear – it’s seen as this boring thing. That’s absolutely not the case in my opinion, because there are so many possibilities with it. There are so many material fibres you can use in knitwear that you’re not really supposed to, but that’s what makes it interesting.”
Breton, who has lived in Paris for the past year and a half, is only a little jaded about the current state of affairs in the scene. “I think it’s always very confusing for anyone who’s living in Paris: you hate it and you love it. I’m always struggling with fashion a bit. It’s the same as with Paris: I love and I hate it. But fashion for me is mostly a way to create a new philosophy, or a new way of being yourself.” While she began working in “a more fashion-y field”, she quickly moved into textiles, and was always more interested in “the texture rather than the shape” and “how the fabric interacts with the body”. With a note of mischief, she adds, “I love taking a really stretchy fibre like elastic and mixing it with something really rigid like raffia or nylon.”
What’s important to Breton – who primarily works with deadstock yarn sourced from Italy – is to be “surprised by the fabric, and what’s going on with the machine”. “I try not to be too one track-minded about what I want to do. I’m working in a really naive, sensitive way,” she says, “it’s all exploring and reacting depending on the results. I’m not really thinking about the market.” Perhaps it is wisest to embark on sartorial ventures in this manner, with the scorched earth of a briefly-functional economy kept firmly in hindsight. For California-born designer Michelle Del Rio, even the most cursory interactions with commercial fashion can prove toxic. “I don’t look at what’s trending or on the runway because I don’t want to populate my mind with these things. There is this constant newness, and that’s not fashion to me, because something that has longevity. Something that’s well-made and takes time to make.”
Del Rio is currently based in Ireland, in the middle of a cross-continental move from New York to Paris. Though she’d felt a desire to make clothes for as long as she can remember, she says, “I only learned how to sew four years ago.” Del Rio began her career working at an AllSaints store. This was where she encountered local fashion students: people who “knew what Celine was and who Phoebe Philo is! I had no idea; I was like 21 and I didn’t grow up in that world. But it inspired me to do more research and go back to school to do a fashion degree. Other than that, I’m pretty much self-taught. I don’t have a background in advanced pattern making or anything.”
She confesses: “I’m not really that invested in the world of fashion at all – I just like to make clothes. I don’t understand how other independent designers can make 10- or 12-piece collections every six months. That’s so much money. I’m a self-funded brand, so it might be different for others, and not to disrespect anyone, but I just feel like that’s such a waste of clothes. It just seems like too much.”
Drawing on her heritage in Colombia, Mexico, and Spain, Del Rio’s work begins with cultural references: “Right now, it’s Wayuu pom-poms, but I’m still very into tassels. There’s this fringe cape you see in Spain right now, and you wrap it around with the fringe coming out – it’s also very prominent in Mexico and Colombia. So I’m looking at a lot of capes and hoods, like the kind my grandmother would wear to church to cover her head.”
Often, music will provide the greatest inspiration. “Tango, bolero, flamenco, bulerías: I listen to that and I can automatically see garments,” she says. “I don’t sketch. I listen to music and I just drape. Fabric comes later. It’s always shape first, and movement.” There are numerous lessons to take away from the new vanguard of slow fashion designers – about couched expectations, creative audacity, and working at pace – but perhaps this is the most important: Don’t overthink it.
Photography JENNA SARACO
Styling JULIE VELUT
Hair LACHLAN MACKIE
Casting NICO CARMANDAYE
Models DENZEL LARYEA at THE SQUAD, CONSTANCE at MODELS 1