With messages like "Haute Couture Barrio" on the back of a deconstructed denim jacket and drawn-on mustaches reading, "Alternative Facts" and "Moral Panic," Mexican designer Barbara Sanchez-Kane took on her own emotions, questioned family, society and religious roles, and put an edge on the politics of both gender and Mexican-American relations.
And that's just this season.
With her own written diaries as a guide, always, the 29-year-old who lives in the Yucatan's Merida put on her first major solo show. Heritage and the emotional chaos of navigating rigid cultural rules when all one wants to do is break out translated into fiery embroidery (courtesy of Mayan craftspeople back home) and bits of wraparound pieces in fabric and metal symbolizing restriction.
Sanchez-Kane had her models congregate on the runway around a copy machine. They grabbed images of themselves, taped them to walls then snatched them off, balled them up and threw them to the ground.
Among her written messages was a T-shirt emblazoned with "Freelance Lover." On another garment, she used a powerful phrase in Spanish that translates to: "Violence in gender kills woman." A third message, on the back of a jacket in red type, reads in English:
"POST-COITAL RELATIONSHIP
POST-COLONIAL RELATIONSHIP"
Much of what she was getting at, she said in a backstage interview, mashed up in her mind as "smuggling" of all kinds.
"To me, smuggling is hiding, at the end, so if you're repressed about your feelings you're hiding it, and so I associated that for the pattern making. It's about that hiding feeling, when people don't want you to be that certain thing when you grow up. In Mexico, society is very strict."
Sanchez-Kane originally studied industrial engineering. When she wanted to drop out of college and switch to fashion design, her American-born mother, Beatriz Kane McNally, insisted she finish her degree.
"She only lacked six courses. I told her she could do whatever she wanted after," said Kane McNally, sitting in her daughter's front row.
Sanchez-Kane completed a degree in fashion design in Florence, and industrial engineering plays a role in her work.
"I think I went to menswear because of that. For me, designing flowy dresses will never work because engineering for me is very rigid. That translates to men's bodies. I use a lot of metalwork that comes from the engineering," she said.
This collection included a pair of metal, high-heeled women's legs, spread-eagled in one look. She used the same image in a wall projection as her models walked, including a solitary female model dressed for battle in military green with bulky storage bulges that resembled ammo packs down the legs.
So what does Beatriz think now of her daughter's designs?
"I don't understand much of it, truthfully," she said. "Sometimes when she asks me, 'Do you like it?' I say, 'You're asking the wrong person. I don't know that much about fashion.'"
-Leanne Italie