The sun is setting in Mexico City’s Juárez neighborhood where, among its crop of thriving art galleries, stylish new cocktail bars, and historic mansions, Patricio Campillo and his team are readying his eponymous label’s Fall/Winter 2025 collection for its sophomore season at New York Fashion Week. “The idea is to elevate menswear,” he says. “It’s flirting with couture.” For now, they are putting the finishing touches on an assortment of garments that reimagine the classically tailored Mexican charro suit as a surreal vision of leather, denim, satin, and wool that pairs flashes of skin—the glint of a collarbone here, a glimpse of a thigh there—with a masterfully architected vision of form and volume.
“It’s an ongoing process of evolving certain codes and recontextualizing what it means to be a man, what it means to be a Charro, and what it meant a few decades ago,” Campillo tells Surface. “Recontextualizing for me is taking the things that I find beautiful and letting go of the things that I am not necessarily attracted by, which comes a lot with the concept of masculinity in Latin America and Mexico.”
In this collection, which debuted to the world one week later as part of a 24-look procession high above the Manhattan skyline, Campillo recast the imagery of the Charro through the lens of magic realism, the oeuvre of surrealist painter Remedios Varo, and a childhood spent surrounded by verdant coffee trees. Some references to these themes—like the coffee-flower buttons that ornament several of the collection’s key pieces, the silvery, chap-like applique that adorns a pair of high-waist, slim fit leather trousers, and the showstopping closing look, a glistening rooster feather blazer—are more overt than others.
To see the collection on the runway after having spent time with Campillo and his team in their home base is to understand the joy and beauty they find in the clothes, the culture, and the community that has sprung up around it from fashion’s most vital platform in North America. “I think New York is culturally relevant because of Latino culture,” Campillo says, referencing its role in hip-hop culture’s roots, and its present ecosystem of editors, producers, fellow designers, and even interns.
“As a cultural niche, I think it’s interesting that there are Latinos doing fashion for the first time. New York, for me, is the fashion capital where the brand has a community, and where people are avid to have a Latino designer,” he says.For proof, look no further than the designer’s post-runway look: a Campillo graphic tee reading “The Gulf of Mexico,” and a sartorial shot heard ‘round the fashion world.
