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 Business News | July 2005 
Mexican Designers Make It Fashionably Cool To Be Uncool
 Laurence Iliff - The Dallas Morning News
| Are You Naco? Here are some clues: (translated from the June 2004 edition of Chilango magazine)
» You drive a Ford Topaz with a Porshe decal.
» You follow behind ambulances just so you can drive fast.
» You wear a polyester blouse made in China with a Lacoste crocodile logo.
» You take "mementos" from hotels and restaurants.
» You buy the latest Chanel perfume and tell everyone it's your fragrance.
» You park in handicapped spots.
» You clap when the airplane lands.
» You use a clothes hanger when the TV antenna fails.
» It's always the other guy's fault. |
When Mexico’s status-conscious youths traded in their designer label T-shirts for ones bearing expressions such as “Naco” and “Estar Guars” a few years ago, it should have been fashion suicide.
Naco in Mexico-speak means “tacky,” “low-class,” “uncool” and a lot of other derogatory things. Estar Guars is how Mexicans mangle “Star Wars.”
But instead of dying, the T-shirts sparked a craze, demonstrating that “Ser naco es chido,” or “Being uncool is cool.”
The celebration of clashing cultures came about because of two former art students: Edoardo Chavarin is a 29-year-old co-founder of the clothing company NaCo, which is a deliberate bilingual play on the “Co.,” for “company.” The other co-founder is Robby Vient, 27.
The two became friends in 1999 while studying at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where the distance from their home country allowed them to see their own culture in different ways.
“We started to notice that we would say things like ‘estar guars’ instead of ‘Star Wars,’ and we thought that was funny,” said Chavarin, a native of Tijuana who uses the tension between U.S. and Mexican cultures in many of the 120 T-shirt designs.
A NaCo favorite, “Chilangolandia,” borrows its design from Disneyland T’s and refers, ironically, to crowded Mexico City as a fantasyland. Mexico City residents are often referred to as chilangos.
On the bilingual NaCo Web site (www.chidochido.com ) one can buy T-shirts for shipment in the United States (average cost is $20), as well as take a naco quiz (Spanish only).
“The plus we have in the United States is the nostalgia factor. You’re bringing them something from home,” Chavarin said.
NaCo sells several thousand T-shirts a month and has nearly 20 full-time employees, Chavarin said. Nobody is getting rich yet, but the company is in a growth phase, he said.
NaCo focused on T-shirts, Chavarin said, “because we only had 500 bucks, and it was easy.”
Success was not automatic. Chavarin used his contacts in the music world (he designs the packaging for CDs from his part-time home in Pasadena) and gave away NaCo shirts to groups such as Molotov to get some exposure.
Eventually the trendy boutiques in Mexico City neighborhoods such as Condesa started carrying the shirts, and now NaCo has a boutique of its own.
The sneaker company Vans has done a NaCo-designed “I Love D.F.” shoe, referring to Distrito Federal, the formal name of Mexico City.
NaCo clothing also is part of MTV’s Fashionista 2005 program, which mixes Latin fashion and music.
“People are seeing us as creative, as trendsetters, and the big brands are saying, ‘Maybe we should talk to these kids,’ ” Chavarin said.
One of NaCo’s biggest coups was a design for the red-hot Colombian singer Juanes at the Latin American Grammy Awards in 2003, when he took home five statues and wore a NaCo shirt emblazoned with “Se Habla Espanol.”
Chavarin said the phrase was something of a protest, given that most of the Latin Grammys show is in English for commercial reasons.
Another NaCo fan is Mexican actor Diego Luna, who played the love-struck airport employee in 2004’s “The Terminal,” starring Tom Hanks.
The best measure of NaCo’s success, however, may be the notice it has gotten from Mexico’s bootleg-clothing industry. Hundreds of vendors on street corners everywhere now sell their own shirts with expressions taken from NaCo or elsewhere.
Zeus Capetillo, a 23-year-old clothes designer, said that while NaCo’s tees may fall short of haute couture, they are clever and authentically Latino in their flavor.
“It’s Mexican kitsch, it’s Mexican pop culture, and that is very popular with foreigners right now,” Capetillo says. At the same time, however, “a real naco would not spend 300 pesos” or $27 on a T-shirt when pirated versions go for a fraction of that.
The biggest challenge for Chavarin is keeping his designs fresh. As a result, NaCo has moved on to icons with a little more social content.
One new T-shirt shows a generic image of a man standing at a bus stop, like those used on signs in airports to indicate men’s and women’s restrooms. Except the man in the image is pointing a gun at the bus.
Crime is a hot-button issue in Mexico, and robberies on public transportation are common.
Another shirt shows an old-style television with a hanger used as an antenna. The lettering below reads, simply, “Mexico.”
“We’ll find different ways to say what we want because we are always reinventing ourselves,” said Chavarin. |
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