Hypebeast Magazine #33: Bárbara Sánchez-Kane

This article originally appeared in ‘Hypebeast Magazine Issue 33: The Systems Issue.’

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane is sitting — manspreading, actually — on a Coca-Cola monobloc chair she used in the audience for one of her runway shows, the red plastic one you might see stacked next to a taco stand. She’s wearing swishy pleated pants of her own design, which she refers to as her “airplane pants” because they’re comfy enough to travel in. She’s surrounded by objects, many of which were featured in her fall 2023 exhibition, New Lexicons for Embodiment, at kurimanzutto New York, the Manhattan branch of Mexico’s bluest of blue-chip galleries.

A wearable sculpture hanging on the wall above the stairs dominates her Mexico City studio, which doubles as a showroom: the artwork is crafted out of dozens of candy-red belts with shiny buckles woven into an armature like an exotic bird at a kink party. As we walk around fingering the clothing racks, she points to a pair of kitten heels she had molded out of bronze, with Jesus Christ reclining in the soles. “Shoes that uncomfortable change the way you walk down the street. They’ll make your life slow down,” she muses, plucking a loose thread from the shoulder of my sweater, as if we’re old acquaintances.

She leads me to what looks like a stack of cinder blocks, pulling on the top to reveal a system of cantilevered storage trays, like a fishing box or a fancy makeup case. That the piece draws comparisons to such distinctly coded objects speaks to the way her absurdist humor challenges binaries of gender as much as genre and form.

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Rodrigo Álvarez

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Rodrigo Álvarez

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Rodrigo Álvarez

Since 2016, the Mexican multi-hyphenate has drawn from fashion, fine art, and industrial design to create a body of work that is all and none of the above. The clothing she designs for her label, Sánchez-Kane, is loosely menswear, though it also mocks masculinity even while channeling its most alluring traits. She’s a suit tailor first and foremost — a skill she learned while studying at the Polimoda Fashion School in Florence, Italy — balancing technical virtuosity with the whimsy of her mad genius imagination: one leather jacket has an inner lining of slap bracelets, so you can wear the bottom half straight down as flaps, kind of like a gladiator skirt, or roll them up and make it a crop top.

“For me, the sexiest thing is a two-for-one look,” she says, standing closer to me than some people might like. “I love things that turn into other things.” She has the audacious presence of some one who’s used to getting what she wants, seemingly through a combination of laser-focused vision and charm that turns on like a light.

Sánchez-Kane keeps up with the fashion industry at her own pace, releasing sporadic collections of up to 120 items and selling by appointment out of her studio, as well as through select outlets like H.Lorenzo and Dover Street Market Los Angeles. She also makes one-off garments that are ready when they’re ready, and has no interest in scaling up to meet demand. “I’m an awful salesman,” she laughs. Sometimes when a customer emerges from the dressing room and asks how they look, she’ll make a face and suggest they go home and mull it over.

“With fashion you get to put it on and make it your own — even f*ck with it,” she continues. “With art, we give it this sacred space of not wanting to touch the piece. I like to interact.”

When asked about the relationship between her fashion and fine art selves, she says the difference is less about the objects and more about how people choose to treat them. “With fashion you get to put it on and make it your own — even f*ck with it,” she continues. “With art, we give it this sacred space of not wanting to touch the piece. I like to interact.”

Certain images, ideas, even shapes appear and reappear in Sánchez-Kane’s work, bouncing back and forth from the runway to the gallery. “If I’m designing a suit or something, that same silhouette can be transmuted into a sculpture,” she says.

For her first major gallery show, in 2021, Prêt-à-Patria — a portmanteau of the French for “ready-to-wear” and the Spanish word patria, for “homeland” — she homed in on one such motif: the soldier. The exhibition, at kurimanzutto’s Mexico City headquarters, consisted of a sculpture shown alongside a video that was originally imagined as a performance, like a conceptual runway show, but COVID had other plans.

In the video, an infantry squadron in a dusty lot performs the escolta, a ceremony of military drills that dates back to the Mexican Revolution. The soldiers, mostly older men with slight paunches, are dressed in standard green fatigues and white gloves with some Sánchez-Kane alterations.

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Rodrigo Álvarez

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Rodrigo Álvarez

The combat boots have bulbous clown toes; their service caps are comically distended, jutting out so the visor dangles like a phallus; and the backs are cut out to reveal a full set of red lace lingerie, the thongs riding up between their tightly clenched cheeks as they goose-step in formation.

Mexicans are inundated with images of revolutionary heroism. Full of macho pageantry, these myths form a core pillar of the country’s self-image. Where other artists might hesitate to remix such sacred symbols, fearing backlash or simply falling into cliché, Sánchez-Kane is down to go there — all the way there. One of the men in the video, who she found online through a civil association that performs such ceremonies, tried to back out of the video, saying the lingerie made him feel like less of a man. “So I gave him proof that he wasn’t going to lose his masculinity, that he had nothing to worry about,” she says.

What, exactly, did she tell him? “That’s kind of private.” She raises her eyebrows.

Military green made a return at her solo show in New York last year, in the form of a leather suit with an egg-carton texture that is a mind-boggling technical feat. It took her a few tries to get it right: First, she had to get the texture to hold its shape using a complex heating process. Then, after trying — and failing — to glue the pattern together, she realized it could be sewn but needed zhuzhing to fix the weird lumps. In the gallery, the wearable sculpture was draped on a chair with the object that inspired it resting on a pant leg: an egg-shaped metal weight with a smiley face she spotted one day at the market. “Tiny objects just make me feel something, like Polly Pockets,” she says.

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Rodrigo Álvarez

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Rodrigo Álvarez

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Rodrigo Álvarez

Mexico’s circus-like street commerce has inspired a lot of her work. The other day, she was standing on the street talking to a friend, and turned around to see an agua fresca stand, the kind with glass jugs full of horchata and other sugary drinks. There were two adjacent jugs with stirring spoons inside them spinning in sync, in the same direction, at the same speed—but the stand was abandoned. There was nobody stirring.

The vignette reminded her of “Perfect Lovers,” the iconic installation by late artist Félix González- Torres, in which two adjacent clocks are set to the same time, and eventually fall out of sync over the course of an exhibition — a devastating metaphor about the death of his partner. This gesture is the basis of a current work-in-progress, and while she won’t say anything more about the object itself or where it will be shown, she was selected to debut new work at the main pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennial. Object aside, just the germ of the idea points to Sánchez-Kane’s superpower: connecting dots we couldn’t see at first, though they were there the whole time.