A friend of ours went to visit one of the designers of Mexican brand, TEAMO, and sent us this picture of one of their Spring 09 blouses. Buttoned-up and cropped to perfection, it got us thinking about how many blouses were styled this way on the Spring 09 runways. Crop tops we're written about, but the buttoned-up look is just now permeating in our minds. We remember seeing a similar look, right off the bat, at the Karen Walker show. It was similarly cropped but, in this case, floral. There were also fabulous examples of buttoned-up tops at Behnaz Sarafpour--these came with strong shoulders too. Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren both did it in creams with full fledged androgynous styling to boot. Even Marc Jacobs, as feminine as was his Spring 09 collection, kept things tidy with this look. 'Buttoned up', admittedly, is something we'll see every season but there seemed to be a plethora of examples this Spring. Just like the choice to tuck-in, buttoning up is a subtle yet marked trend in its own right.

To see that pink TEAMO blouse in action, click here. 

What we know about TEAMO probably doesn't amount to much more than what most New York fashion people know about this brand based in Mexico City. We know that the designers often crop up in street-style/party photography websites, that the TEAMO aesthetic has traces of religious and/or gothic influences, and that, alongside brands like Marvin y Quetzal and Temores, they somewhat embody the fashion scene in Mexico City. This season we thought they broke some of their own boundaries with an array of sophisticated frocks. The colors were vibrant and the embroidery created suggestive smiley faces--but none of this compromised the seriousness of the collection. Something tells us TEAMO won't be known 'just a little bit' for much longer...in the end, this was one of our favorite contemporary collections from the Spring 2009 season. 

Get it while it's hot folks, we've a world class reporter who is recapping fashion week straight from Mexico City. With all of the fashion weeks and trade shows, the capsule collections and designer collaborations, coverage can difficult to negotiate (especially when you're turning over content like you've been asked to cook up 150 pancakes by noontime). The decision is always dependent on whether you're satisfied repurposing content or whether you'd rather produce less but have it either be original or at the very least thoughtful. It's a predicament specific to this exact moment in fashion journalism, and one that we constantly meditate on. That said, when Mexico Fashion Week rolled around we nearly passed on the chance to curate one of our world famous 'recaps'. We remembered then, our friend, Max Gustashaw, who recently moved to Mexico City from New York. Heads were scratched, thought bubbles appeared above heads, we wrote and, what do you know, the devilishly handsome Gustashaw had been perched in the tents in the first place. This week, he'll be rounding up a few of his favorite shows from Fashion Week in Mexico. For his first installment, he reports on the TEAMO show complete with exclusive video coverage.
Mexico City, TEAMO Fashion Show
"Mexico City's all mixed up," says Rafa Cuevas, who, with Roberto Sanchez, created Mexican design label TEAMO two and a half years ago. "You can be in the most fancy neighborhood and just around the corner is a [poor] neghborhood and just around the corner [from that] is bam, bam, fifties, fifties, futuristic, art-deco." And, of course, the earthquake-bombed. Before these peculiar positionings existed, the city's European architects designed a city of homestyle provenance, and the indigenous population, Quetzal Rangel of fellow design partnership Marvin y Quetzal tells me, interpreted and built upon their plans, creating a distinctly Mexican milieu of imposed and inherited influences that persists and explains, in part, the position from which TEAMO and a handful of their local contemporaries stage their eager sally upon the world.
A few years ago, such a movement lay beyond the reach, and in fact the consideration, of most Mexicans. But just as filmmakers, artists, architects, and musicians have risen, over the past several years, from Mexico's growing middle class to create potent and internationally recognized work, and as urban youth in New York and Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Montreal turn envious eyes and take optimistic grabs at international opportunity here (compare it to Berlin just ten years ago), Mexico City's fashion forward have eagerly taken ownership of a ripe and virulent identity fresh to the outside world and have seized the tools of internet-age populist scene-building such as myspace, Facebook, and the like. As well they have tuned into websites like The Face Hunter (Mexico City has its own--Diario de Fiestas), which have allowed the fashion élite to share their ideas on a worldwide scope, and monthly European, American, and Japanese magazines that just can't put forth enough online fashion content to feed the hungry.
Inspired not just by burgeoning cultural opportunities within their strange and storied city, but by the jungle, fear of the dark, and by love, horror movies, and children's illustration, TEAMO delivered their Fall and Winter 2008/09 collection to a Fashion Week crowd on tenterhooks in an auditorium adjacent to Friday night's most popular Lucha Libre venue, and I don't feel naïve to suggest a shared thread of playful aggression and craft between the two spectacles; TEAMO's expressive pieces, heavily paneled in uniform color, feathered and fured and with subtle animal countenance, spill forth music, illustration, and sarcasm, and explode, at times, with texture and light.

Te Amo Otoño Invierno 08-09 from max gustashaw on Vimeo.