Fashion Show "Kara Walker"
The fashion show by students of the Saltzman Chair once again transforms the sidewalk outside Fundación Proa into a spectacle worthy of international runways. Each year since 2010, students take Proa’s exhibitions as their point of departure to create original collections, later presented in open-air fashion shows that bring fashion into the urban space and draw neighbors, visitors, and passersby who come to the La Boca neighborhood to experience an unusual public event.
Throughout this collaborative experience, striking works have been presented in dialogue with major international exhibitions. In 2010, fashion design students interpreted Futurism; in 2015, they drew inspiration from the figure of Joseph Beuys; and in 2016, they appropriated the universe of Yves Klein to create new garments. These were followed by projects focused on Malevich (2017), Minimalism and Conceptual Art (2019), Labyrinths (2022), Bodies, Weaves, and Territories (2023), and The Incas: Beyond an Empire (2024).
Each fashion show translated curatorial concepts, historical research, formal exploration, and expressive tools into the language of clothing, opening up new ways of thinking about the relationship between art and design.
In this new edition, the academic work is oriented around two exceptional exhibitions: ¡Here We Are! Women in Design 1900–Today, presented through August, and the current exhibition devoted to the American artist Kara Walker, on view through November.
In relation to Here We Are! Women in Design 1900–Today, Project 1 presents works in which students took various women designers as references, generating iconographic encounters conceived as tattoos on the body. Based on this same research, they developed three-dimensional textiles using cut-out techniques.
In Project 2, after selecting different imaginaries from the exhibition and addressing issues of gender, students developed reversible coats that play with surprise between both sides, featuring an initial recycled tailoring “skin” and using resources explored through research on outerwear. Project 4 builds on these references to explore the versatility and adaptability of forms to the body.
In connection with the Kara Walker exhibition, Project 1 developed exercises using knitted “skins” that draw on silhouettes characteristic of the artist’s work. In Project 4, students worked with the recycling of men’s shirts, creating variable systems of articulation and disarticulation of simple, quilted parts, along with a third waterproof layer made from the precarious material of garbage bags.
As the closing of the fashion show, students from Project 3 developed a series of transformable creatures that mutate through the transformation of movement.