Oscar Cantero: Between Fashion and Music

“I’m a workaholic”, Oscar Cantero confesses. “I’m always thinking about designing”. Oscar is the first male to have won the contest. His collection describes an analogy between two music styles: hip hop and tango. He chooses to express it through their most representative characters: “the African American gangster from the classic seventies movie, or jazz musicians from the forties and fifties and the petitero in tango, the cool guapo who wouldn’t take a knife and who dresses fancy. Oscar tells he “discovered the origins of hip hop are very alike to those of tango, they come up in lower class. As they both are wide cultural movements, the equivalent graffiti in hip-hop is filete in tango, and they both have their language; in hip-hop is slang. In tango, the lunfardo”.

He prints his own mark in his designs; he changes tailoring mixing it with baggy style and big clothes typical or black musicians. “But I didn’t want to take it to all my garments, so I just made the pockets bigger”, he says.

As for BAFweek, Oscar thinks “this fashion shows are the most interesting of Buenos Aires, because each of them is particular and has a choreography and stage design, of its own. If, for example, you want to throw grass along the runway, it’s ok”.

Oscar sells his clothes in self-held clothes fairs, the new boom of local fashion. From the contest and presentation of his collection to society, he’s been offered to work as the costume designer of “Mambruﾓ, Popstars Argentinean group born in a TV casting.

Even though the bet is risky, Oscar takes it as a defy and he admits that “if everyone chooses white, I choose white, for a change”. As a little child, he was interested in alternative cultures and it appears not only in his designs but also in his attitude towards work.

Inside this reality, they need to recreate and transform the environment. “Argentinean design has a little bit of everything. As it is a problematic place to live, we have to sharpen our wit to make the most of our resources”. Doubtlessly, he gives the example. Even before summer, he had his winter collection already designed, with its turn of twist incorporated, of course.

Gabriela Varela: Collector of Remaining Fabric

The new talents do their best to turn the twist of everything. Maybe that’s the reason why they were chosen. Gabriela Varela experiments. She paints, draws, works the clothes, textures the fabrics, dyes them in her bath tub, with the help from all her family; she also searches and invents.

At the time, she’s working in a garments store and waits for the moment to come home each day and take the remaining defective clothes, the ones the owner discards. She starts looking for a better ending and she actually finds it.

Her collection was inspired in Jodou, a Chinese love story “in the fifties, in a dry cleaning. The scenes I liked best were the ones of hanging clothes, Gabriela tells. “When I began doing research on Chinese culture, I discovered the simplicity of the garments, they are enveloping and tied up, there are no fasteners or buttons. I was very close to them because I don’t like over elaborated clothes. I prefer simple”.

Gabriela still doesn’t believe her collection was introduced to the public. “BAF was a slap of reality. It boosted my ego and therefore I decided to start my career”, she says. Nevertheless, talent has to split hairs. For that, the young designer wants to “gain experience in the real world”. Making wearable art, showing and selling, getting inspired to the people, opening new doors so that clothes reach people. That’s the way to make the chain work.