Carla Fernandez is a Mexican artist/designer born in 1973, in Saltillo, Mexico. She grew up learning to appreciate the history of her country, along with its culture and pattern designs. Today, she uses her inspirations to put them in her designs for clothing for her fashion label. Her and her team travel around Mexico, visiting the different villages and towns. She gets to know the people and their home and soon collaborate with the artisans. She works closely developing and learning different techniques and later recognizes the artisans on the collections.
After two decades of hard work, Carla’s work was the first ever fashion exhibition held at the Gardner Museum. The collection featured a method Carla and her team adopted, called “The Square Root,” from a Mexican tradition of making clothing from squares and rectangles.
The Mexican pattern-making movement mainly features work from Chiapas, Mexico City, the State of Mexico, Yucatan, Campeche and new designs from Guerrero. Not only did the collection consisted of clothing and garments, but it also had works of textiles, drawings, photographs, performance, video, and workshops.
“I want people to understand that you can find happiness many different ways, and one way is by creating goods by hand and making things unique to the artist,” Fernández said. “Discovering the process helps people to understand how these different worlds work, because you fall in love with the artisan, and then you fall in love with the piece. You can create a whole economy based on the artists, and how their work is made.” – Carla Fernandez, http://carlafernandez.com
