From the cultural-craft heritage to couture… “Just a jump.”

I am a big fan of the high couture with peculiar roots in the native of our indigenous heritage and its colonial mixture.

I consider that from the beginning of colonial time and the different indigenous cultures, two icons from the hard work and manual labor of the aguja panameña are the inspiration to the new generation of Panamanian designers, to me they are the Pollera, which is our national dress, with all its hard work, and the mola, which is an art from the Kuna Indians (thanks to Nicole Miller who just launched her PANAMANIA collection in the New York Fashion Week) comes back identifying itself as Panamanian heritage (the Colombians were ahead of us in taking it as an international commercialization, claiming it as theirs… and the truth is that the Mola, which in part we share because of the very few isles that might be in their territory, but it is remotely Panamanian craft).

With the exception of Helene Breebaart and Patricia Maduro, there are very few Panamanian designers that have taken matter in their own hands of taking the the technique of making the Mola into an advanced fashion for the Luxury of big capitals of the world. Breebaart and other designers know the importance of not losing the tradition that mothers transmit to their daughters, as it is in the Kuna culture in our more than 350 islands of the Archipieago de San Blas, Pese, and Los Santos. But lets be clear, if we don’t give this piece of art the value it deserves, we might lose it in time.

Panama is definitely not a textile and confection country, but it does have the advantage of counting with the best seamstresses of the region. Some of the Panamanian designers, year after year, surprise us with proposals that range from the most delicate and the application of lace, to the most artistic and laborious of applications. I observe that more and more each day in the haute ateliers the workforce consists mostly of Kuna Indians, or ladies from the outskirts of the city that place their service fully into the designers that handle the most contemporary proposal. This is the case for Panamanian designers such as Helene Breebart, Tony Vergara, Tatiana Uliansteff, Annie Chajin, Alessandra Grau, Moises Sandoya, among others. I love that designers take the most colorful aspects of our ethnicities and put them into their contemporary designs. There is a search, and this search has some flavor… flavor of origins and tropic.

We have reached a step to generate more chains of production, this step is to comprehend that the value of our Fashion proposals comes from the hand of our craftsmen.

For more information about the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Panama please click here.