Scarred Surfaces, Twisted Volumes: Spotlight on Miguel Mesa Posada |

Let's continue the thread about volumes that started with yesterday's post, but expand it by introducing another theme – scarred surfaces. Let's do so by looking at a young designer who represented Colombia at London's International Fashion Showcase in February, Miguel Mesa Posada.

Inspired by his seamstress grandmother, Posada studied Fashion Design at the Colegiatura Colombiana de Medellín, and developed a passion for combining pre-Colombian legends, myths and history with social issues, architectural inspirations and arty textiles à la Olga de Amaral's.

His “Potosí” collection features garments in bright shades of yellow, fuchsia, green and blue with a distinctive cracked surface. The starting inspiration behind this collection was Eduardo Galeano's 1971 book Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina (The Open Veins of Latin America) that mentioned the story of Potosí, the richest silver mine on earth, located in Bolivia.

The surface of Posada's design represents the scars left in the territory by excavations and commercial mining. To recreate them the designer firmly kept in mind brightly coloured aerial views of mines such as the Chilean mine called La Escondida (View this photo), as captured by North American satellites (for further inspiring aerial images check out Sam Cristoforetti's twitter with her pictures from space…).

The designer then tried to redesign these geological lacerations manipulating the fibers and carving new three-dimensional paths that simulated the geological strata in open pit mines.

The name of the collection also means in Spanish "unmesurable wealth" and points people towards the real wealth in Latin America that doesn't stand in precious metals, but in the ritual way of living in a community and in woven products such as crafted fabrics.

Architecture-wise Posada was inspired by bambusa ceilings for his "Altiplano" leather and wood shoes, that represent also a study about the strength and flexibility of materials.

This inspiration was taken to another level in his "Altiplano" collection. The voluminous designs featured in this collection question specific aspects of pre-Hispanic cultures and they are the result of a combination of bambusa buildings, fragmented ceramics and woven fabrics.

Each dress is an abstracted rendition of a traditional ceramic piece characteristic of pre-Hispanic cultures, translated onto a textile material commonly used in tire construction, provided by Enka, an artificial fiber factory. The silhouettes of these garments are quite ample, but they twist and coil around the body, fluidly cocooning it or forming around it knotted motifs (imagine inflating or twisting around the body a Mariano Fortuny pleated gown and you get an idea…).

Posada's main reference for these garments was the book Arqueología Colombiana by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, while the collections of the Museo Arqueológico de Sogamoso and of the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino remain firm inspirations not just in these designs but in his entire practice.

While the lookbook images that illustrate the collection display some connection with art as the photographs look a bit like delicate paintings, the designer also moved from a post-archaeological approach in this collection, wondering what would a futuristic impression of the Muisca dress (made with a single piece of rectangular cloth wrapped around the body) look like.

In future Posada plans to focus on fabrics and discover more about the textile craftsmanship in his homecountry, reinventing traditional techniques in a modern key. Given these first visually striking experiments led by rather unusual inspirations, it looks like Posada is definitely one to watch.