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The designer, born in 1974, is the first Spanish woman in history and a gypsy, as she likes to claim, to walk the haute couture catwalks in Paris. This Thursday she participated for the third time in the fashion week reserved for large firms. After ‘Origins’ and ‘Andalusia’, she wore ‘Fauves’ (Fieras), a collection of designs inspired by cubism and its greatest exponent Pablo Picasso. Hours before the show, she took the time to be on our show.
The French press presents her as one of the most versatile Spanish designers. And it is that in Juana Martín’s workshop in her native Córdoba, in the south of Spain, not only haute couture designs are made but they also make ‘prêt-à-porter’, wedding dresses, and accessories. Martín has also dared to design the costumes for the spectacular flamenco dance group ‘Ángeles y Demonios’ by Patricia Donn that has just performed in Madrid.
It is the third time that she has walked the haute couture parade in Paris, a consecration for this tireless worker whose name is already among the top Spanish designers in Paris: Cristóbal Balenciaga, Paco Rabanne and Josep Font. She never imagined that she would go this far.
“You don’t expect it, but the reality is that we have been doing fashion for many years, also vindicating culture, tradition, sentiment and race a lot and this has come to conquer people like the French Federation of Haute Couture and Fashion”, explains to us.
She is the first Spanish woman to walk with the most important global brands and she thinks that if the haute couture sector took notice of her proposals, it is partly because she and her team are doing a sincere job. “We tell a truth, there really isn’t much infrastructure around the parade we put together, so we tell a true story, a poetic story,” says Martín.
Getting to the top and staying at this level, with a haute couture show every six months, requires a lot of work and responsibility, but he acknowledges that “he has made a quantum leap.” “Haute Couture opens a door to the world of global fashion, we are really working with people practically from all over the world and this means that responsibility and work are always at the top”, she affirms.
Juana Martín always wanted to be a fashion designer. Her parents sold fabrics in the markets and she already made dresses for her sister as a child. “It has always been a concern and that concern leads you to continue investigating, to continue studying, to be awake at all times, it is a way of life,” explains the Cordovan woman.
After the ‘Andalucía’ and ‘Origenes’ parades, the proposal ‘Fauves’, which in Spanish translates as ‘beasts’, arrives in Paris from his hand, a series of creations inspired by Spanish cubist artists with Pablo Picasso from Malaga at the head.
“Beasts is what those painters who uncontrolled the face were called, at that time photography was developed, then the painter reinvented himself and expressed a form of nonconformity, looking for other sensations, it was like a kind of rage for what was happening at that time in Spain”, explains Martín. We cannot stop thinking about Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, which represents the bombing of the city of Guernica on April 26, 1937 by the Nazi German and Italian Fascist aircraft, allies of General Franco.
In a world that hasn’t quite turned around well, with many conflicts and dramatic situations such as the war in Ukraine, migrants who have to leave their homes or riots on the outskirts of large cities, we wanted to ask Juana to what is haute couture for?
“I do not come from a ghetto, I do not come from a war, I come from a gypsy family and I feel very proud because I have not had any problems on that side, but I do know people who have had them, I believe that Haute Couture , apart from luxury, logically, it is also an important point to make people dream. That is what we try, “he concludes.
