Gabriela Coll Garments
Recently we became familiar with the Barcelona-based Gabriela Coll Garments. The interesting new project by the Spanish Gabriella Coll focuses on the way of dressing and the value of garments, while working through Series. Each Series is the result of concrete imagery, they do not follow any season or have a fixed number of pieces, and are always permanent. Serie No. 1 is composed of 15 pieces: consisting of garments for men and women, bags, accessories and footwear, marked by the transcendence of time, the way they sit on the body and the nobility of the materials – with everything, from the accessories to the clothes being hand-made. In many ways the project reminds us strongly – aesthetically, in the communication as in the motivations – of the now defunct Maison Martin Margiela or Ines Kaag’s Bless, but a wise man once said that originality died with the eruption of the internet, making Gabriela Coll Garments in our eyes a perfect example of a great new interpretation of existing ideas, very much in line with the current zeitgeist.
I like how the architect Sáenz de Oiza compared architecture with people in an interview. According to him, architecture, just like people, is defined by its structure, but also for the decorum. I think that clothes are part of this decorum. This is very important because decorum is the scenery oneself can build to appear in front of the world.
Gabriele Coll‘s background lays in studying fine art, not necessarily to become an artist, but because she felt there was a lot to learn in that field. Subsequently she complemented her art studies with investing a lot of time learning crafts: from tailoring, shoe making, dressmaking to hat making. Inspired and motivated by the idea that learning the crafts would give here a complete image of the process of creation, from the initial idea to the final eruption. This combination of being aesthetically savvy next to having the knowledge of the production techniques necessary to materialize an idea forms Gabriela’s perfect preconditions to design for Gabriela Coll Garments. Serie No. 1 was released last December and Gabriela is currently working of Serie No. 2. As stated in an interview with Design and Culture by Ed on her breakout set of products:
The nobility of the materials is one of the aspects that relate all pieces in Serie No. 1. The materials I actually work with most are natural leather and cotton, which I use for developing the pieces while I do prototypes. These plain materials relate more with the stage of seeking that might be even more interesting than finding. Lacquering them is also about keeping that presence of not defined, it has to do with the attractive part of prototypes more than with finished pieces.
For more information and to order the pieces of Serie No. 1 online see here.