Amid the fog that shrouds the green mountain landscapes of San Lucas Redención in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, a group of women can be seen in the distance, distinguished by the fluorescent accents of their dresses. They are Mixtec women from the High Sierra. Silent shepherds lead the sheep and as they walk, their hands are busy embroidering fabrics. They use the Pepenado technique in their clothes, which seems to speak for them. A skill they learned from their grandmothers: line by line, they pass the thread with the needle, gather the white fabric until it turns into an accordion and construct complex figures.
These thousand-colored women, who find a rhythm in their fabric on their pilgrimage through the mountains, wear on the front of their blouses a fauna of deer, goats, birds and on their sleeves abstract figures of the flora of their country. Everything is embroidered on bright green, burgundy, yellow, orange or Mexican pink backgrounds. The complexity of their technique, which works like an abacus leaving loose stitches, cannot be explained: they learned it by knitting, they taught it by knitting. It was this rarity, this uniqueness of textures that seduced Maria Grazia Chiuri, designer of the House of Dior, to work with them on their Mexican-inspired Cruise 2024 collection.
Marcelina, Victoria, Elízabeth, María Juana, Irma, Virginia, Francisca and Isabel did not want to sell their identities to the prestigious French house because so many in the city dared to accuse them. It was their processes and techniques that entered into dialogue with the designs of the fashion house’s full skirts and sleek, tailored jackets. “For the Cruise collection, three characters were used: the orchid, the shamrock and a kind of abstract flower,” explains Narcy Morales, a designer who led this group of women and coordinated the entire collaboration process. “The embroiderers know what distinguishes them as women of the ethnic group to which they belong and they protect what they have more than anyone else.” Only they can make variations with 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 take on challenges,” adds Narcy.
Mexican artist Elina Chauvet collaborated with Maria Grazia Chiuri to design a series of dresses embroidered with phrases that spoke about femicide in Mexico. Ximena del Valle ( ©Elina Chauv
For these Mixtec women, collaborating with Dior was a way 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’s festivals that the work of embroidering a blouse for three months deserves recognition and high compensation. They have an art: the landscape is their workshop, the embroidery is their signature. A unique expression, impossible to copy, no two pieces are the same. For this reason, she was interested in equating her knowledge of craftsmanship with haute couture, which was the major focus that Maria Grazia Chiuri wanted to give to this collection.
“This dialogue that we have created between fashion and artisanal knowledge can help maintain the tradition in the future, because there is always the risk that we will lose this knowledge,” said Chiuri in the interview he gave before his parade in Mexico. “I am very sensitive to this issue. “I come from southern Italy, where the tradition of passing on craft knowledge from mother to daughter was lost because the second generation found other, more profitable interests, because craft work was seen as something domestic and because hard work was not recognized,” explained the designer who, on her journey of discovery through Mexico, also worked with the Nahua weaver Hilan Cruz Cruz, with the warp technique expert 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, who has been working to preserve textiles in Mexico for 30 years, fully understands the fear that motivates Chiuri to travel the world and some of it to make visible the more hidden and traditional web knowledge.
Remigio Mestas, weaver and promoter of Mexican textiles, who with a group of artisans made four huipils for Dior’s Crucero collection. Ximena del Valle (©Remigio Mes
He himself was forced to stop using the loom he inherited from his mother in order to create opportunities that would allow the fabrics of hundreds of communities to provide an income and be preserved in the meantime. “As a child, I watched my mother spend two months weaving a huipil on her backstrap loom, going to the city market and making sure no one paid her the price she asked. If he asked for 1,000 pesos, they offered him 100. He had to leave it to the highest bidder and wait for them to pay him in installments on market days. The solution I chose was to buy ready-made fabric and simply embroider it. But that meant losing his art, giving it up,” explains the artisan, who today works with 42 communities in Oaxaca and eight other communities throughout Mexico. “The commitment to these 400 families is to ensure that textiles remain relevant and increasingly valued.”
Remigio was responsible for coordinating the weaving of four huipils for Dior’s Cruise 2024 collection, incorporating the weaving, embroidery and dyeing expertise of the Zapotecs of San Blas Atempa, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Chinantecs of the Papaloapan Basin in the National Valley was collected. “When Dior approached us about this collaboration, we set three conditions that were non-negotiable: The first, credit where credit is due, that is, giving credit to the community and the weaver who worked on each garment . . “Secondly, a fair price for the work we wanted to do, and finally, the clarity that the identity of the community cannot be bought,” explains the weaver, who is clear that the textiles that the communities produce for foreigners are affordable can. Variations and changes in the warp and weft, for example through looser weaving so that the fabric has more movement.
In the land of Remigio it is said that the Huipil was born of the Goddess of the Thirteen Serpents, a deity who came into being when the conquistadors cut down a copal tree to build a church. The stripes on the shoulders of the huipil, the coral on the chest (a kind of plume) and the line embroidered in colors at the end still have the power to represent these snakes. The sacred breath of this garment has managed to remain current within the community despite selling its fabrics to foreigners for decades.
Sodelva Espinoza Gutiérrez, experienced weaver in the warp technique. Ximena del Valle
Beyond the discussion that this collaboration with Dior has sparked, Remigio Mestas and the communities he has worked with are clear that in a country like Mexico that has suffered so much from plagiarism and appropriation by famous fashion brands, “this is a path” that fashion must follow to collaborate with artisans. “Today the mestizos of Oaxaca and Mexico already wear huipil. As a child, when I sold what my mother had knitted, many people told me that it looked like a sack of potatoes. This rejection still applies today, as many despise the clothing of indigenous peoples and their textiles. But after collaborating with Dior, those who had not yet decided are now daring to do it, because they have realized that what we do is on a par with what the best in the world do,” concludes Mestas.
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