“Textile miracles happen sometimes”… That’s how Francisco Cancino opened a conversation about his new collection, referring to the access he had this season to a bank of silk fabrics. Yes, the materials in this delivery are “very fine,” but with Cancino, things go deeper than a lucky textile break. There is always a need to say something, that recurring instinct to filter Mexican history and memory through contemporary clothing.
While he previously turned to Nietzsche to explore internal monsters, here the Chiapas-born designer draws from Jorge Luis Borges and his book The Aleph, which explores that point in space and time where all things coexist at once. Borges’s book gave Cancino a reason to revisit his own work, not as an act of self-homage, but with a purpose as philosophical as it is practical: taking pieces from his existing catalog and “bringing them to life and bringing them to life and bringing them to life.”
The result is a collection that feels especially vibrant, with a sense of movement amplified by saturated primary colors, sharp proportions, and silk fabrics that give the clothes a constant fluidity.
For a couple collections now, Cancino has been navigating the tension between his itch for an artistic brand and the fact that, at the end of the day, he sells ready-to-wear. With this collection he seems more at ease; the tension no longer feels like tension, but balance.
Perhaps because of that ease, he has allowed himself new creative liberties, which include a new fascination with the bustle. He applied the very contemporary obsession with exaggerating certain parts of the body — in his case influenced by Alexander McQueen — to Mexican denim, which resulted in looks that feel deeply romantic, something relatively new in the Cancino universe, yet entirely of the moment. “I was thinking about the permissions I give myself when talking about Mexico, and well, Mexico had the City of Palaces, bustles walking down Reforma, you know? It’s a way of talking about history but with a pair of jeans. They look fascinating.”
Yes, they really do. Like Borges’ Aleph, the collection holds multiple worlds: romance and utility, history and modernity, artistic instinct and commercial clarity. In Cancino’s hands, they no longer feel like opposing forces, but part of the same language.
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