JAVIER S. MEDINA X CARLOTA BARRERA

This artisanal jacket is a singular piece that illustrates the creative potential of pairing design with craftsmanship. The beauty and intricacy of bullfighting tailoring, and the ceremony around the spectacle is something precious and unique to Spanish culture. But there is a brutality to it that it was felt must be challenged. The heavily embellished matador jacket typically stands in fierce contrast to the raw physicality of the bull, highlight the pitting of civilised man against beast. And so the challenge was to re-think the matador costume, to interpret those details and explore ways of bringing man and beast closer together.

The result sits somewhere between a garment and an artistic piece – wearable art. The structured matador’s jacket, made of pleita, weaves bunches of esparto into elaborate braids, sewn together with twine to hold the form of the pattern by our collaborator, Javier S. Medina. Challenging the aesthetic of luxury, this piece aims to show that the quality of a piece should not be based purely on its superficial allure or its component fabric, but that there is immense value in the craft behind the construction and handling of materials, whether luxurious or, as in this case, humble.

Photography Alex Cascallana