Trending Havana

It's known. More than a trend, it has become a vice. Havana is chosen as background for video clips, photographic shows, fashion shows and pleasure scales by many celebrities from the international art world, it does not matter if they do it loudly or in the purest clandestine manner, so as not to attract attention.

The other edge of the matter is that the old city has been preparing a round birthday for a while, of which any generation applauds only once, because there is no chance for more. Five hundred years are not celebrated every day, and that's why San Cristóbal de La Habana puts on makeup and goes out to its old heritage streets to show off their best clothes.

And more or less that has been seen, and in what way, in recent days, just happened in the Cuba Pavilion and the headquarters of the French Alliance in the Cuban capital Fashion Week in Havana, «Crafts and Identidad », an event that was attended by around seventy designers and more than forty fashion shows, and was sponsored by the National Council of Plastic Arts and the Cuban Fund of Cultural Assets as a way of inviting" the talented creators of all the provinces of the country to reveal the skills and expertise in the craft, textile design, goldsmithing, costume jewelry, work with the skin ... ».

One of the high points of the meeting was the presence of designers from the French-speaking Caribbean area Eliette Lesurperbe (Guadeloupe), Alex Rotin (French Guyana) and Paul-Hervé Elisabeth (Martinique), as well as Yvette Tai-Coquillay (born in the Congo and resident in France), creator of the professional and international platform Labo-Ethnik in Paris, a kind of "ethnic laboratory" of Franco-Caribbean designers who organize a show every year in Paris that, for three days, becomes an alternative for the exhibition of designs that start from the most authentic traditions of the culture of African origin.

For five nights, and with great public presence, the central Cuba Pavilion of El Vedado hosted multiple fashion shows that demonstrated the good health of textile design in our country and the need for industry once and for all to be able to take advantage of the talent of our creators, so that the inhabitants of this archipelago we do not have to depend hundred percent of what imposes us a retailer very far from the quality and good taste.

In the Gómez Palace on the Paseo del Prado, headquarters of the French Alliance, several conferences and workshops were held for two days, aimed at specialists and professionals from the world of runways, such as the one titled "Entrepreneurship and Fashion Management", with an exhibition of concepts and vision of the future of the creative-productive process exposed by Maité Duménigo, Elliette Lesuperbe, Ivette Tai-Coquillay, Jesús Frías and Paul Herve Elisabeth.

Arte por Excelencias was present at the morning session of the first day of this theoretical meeting. Thanks to Dr. Nieves Laferté, for his documented lecture "Archeology and the science of costume: the basics of stage clothing", we learned that until the eighteenth century the shoes of both feet were made with the same mould, that is, they were identical: nothing of one for the right foot and another for the left. Only the force of habit made the human being ignore the torture of putting on a pair of leather tricks ... or metal, poor man who had to scare off his armor.

The also Dr. Piedad Subirats spoke on "The communicator and its image in television media", a topic that should be on the agenda of any action to train directors, announcers and animators of Cuban Television. It is to be regretted the clothing that is exhibited, very much in tune with the armor of the eighteenth century ... or the bikinis of the second half of the twentieth.