When it comes to stereotypes, some are definitely harder to shake than others. Since the 1960s, the world has had a rather skewed but enduring image of fashion from Brazil: body-conscious beachwear, Havaianas sandals and diaphanous tunics resplendent with tropical prints.
Today, the country’s assortment of sultry swimsuits and effervescent resort wear continues to sell spectacularly well, both domestically and abroad — but that perennial success often seems to overshadow the rest of Brazil’s buoyant luxury fashion industry, including ready-to-wear, shoes, accessories and jewelry.
What’s more, it has perpetuated the myth that Brazilian style can be reduced to its most pedestrian, predictable and patronizing cliché: “Life’s a beach,” where Brazilian designers are interested in dressing only the scantily clad whose feet seldom leave the sand.
“This intensely repeated image is often accompanied by preconceptions and prejudices that do tend to level everyone — but it is also, clearly, very annoying,” says Graça Cabral, chief of institutional relations and strategic partnerships at Luminosidade, the company that organizes the country’s two main fashion events, São Paulo Fashion Week and Fashion Rio. “We are not happy all the time; we are not dancing all the time; we are not sunny all the time; we are not all on the beach having caipirinhas and showing off our marvelous sculptural tanned bodies.”
Although São Paulo Fashion Week has made notable progress in positioning Brazil’s largest city as the world’s fifth most important fashion capital in just 15 years, following Paris, Milan, New York and London. And while it has nutured an exceptionally diverse club of designers with a range of signature styles, aesthetics and approaches, the message of design diversity has been slow to reach those whose opinions often matter most: international consumers and less well-informed tastemakers, some of whom wield great power and influence in the global fashion industry.
Erika Palomino, a renowned Brazilian fashion editor and consultant, says that since the beginning of the 2000s, when international media and buyers started coming to Brazil to watch the catwalks, they have looked for color, prints, beachwear and revealing clothes.
“When they first saw collections from designers like Reinaldo Lourenço or Alexandre Herchcovitch, they were kind of shocked or even disappointed and criticized their global approach, asking ‘Where’s their Brazilian identity?’
“What’s that supposed to be? Designing with Carmen Miranda in mind?” she asks sarcastically.
“For a while, the Brazilian designers who didn’t have prints, colors, so-called sensual clothes, ethnic-looking embroidery or handcrafted techniques would not sell and not be popular abroad,” she says. “So sometimes designers had to make concessions and look to obvious Brazilian themes like Carnival and the Amazon to be noticed at all or to sell — especially for the U.S. market. Now, thankfully, the situation is a bit better.”
One Brazilian designer who suggests that there are still plenty of people in need of educating is Pitty Taliani, who together with Carolina Gold, founded Amapô — a brand that is in no short supply of vivid colors and loud prints but clearly is inspired more by subversive subcultures and the deconstructivist movement than by the beach lifestyle.
“It’s still sometimes difficult to convince people abroad that there is an entire design platform here, not just bikini-wearing sambistas,” she says. “We can’t deny that Amapô is a brand with a Brazilian soul. It’s somehow inspired by our culture, which definitely awakens the senses, but we are always mixing other things into it.”
Minimalism and subtlety also have found their way into the country’s fashion design palette, along with abrasive avant-garde styles and broody gothic looks, too.