Wes Gordon Previews Carolina Herrera Resort 2025 Collection Amid the Stone Totems in Mexico City
Wes Gordon was leaning into the Mexico City culture Thursday afternoon ahead of the presentation of his Carolina Herrera resort 2025 collection at Museo Anahuacalli.
“The geometry of the space in the volcanic rock is really amazing and you know how I feel about color. It’s such an important part of my process at Herrera so seeing this as a canvas for those colors…it was an immediate no-brainer for me,” he said of the spectacular venue, with its sunken courtyard.
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Completed in 1964, the Aztec-meets-Mayan style temple of arts was designed by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to house his vast collection of pre-Columbian works, figurines, carvings and totems. Anahuacalli (from the Náhuatl word “house surrounded by water”) was brought to life with his daughter Ruth Rivera Marín and architect Juan O’Gorman, and is just 3 miles from Casa Azul, where he lived for years with Frida Kahlo.
“This is not a 2,000-year-old ruin, it was built in the 1960s…it’s such an amazing mixture of the 20th century and the past, and it’s very Mexico City,” he said.
Timed to sunset, the predominantly Mexican cast of models walked a pink crushed stone runway in the courtyard in front of the stunning carved volcanic stone museum and ecological preserve of native plants. In the seats were 500 guests including Karlie Kloss, the face of Carolina Herrera Good Girl perfume, Mexico City native and “Baby Reindeer” star Nava Mau, “Roma” actress Yalitza Arapicio and more.
The Puig-owned fashion house is the rare American brand to have joined the luxury world of traveling runway shows. This will be the second, after the resort 2024 collection was staged in Rio last June.
It is also Herrera’s first foray into see now, buy now, with the collection landing in stores, including a Casa Herrera pop-up at El Palacio de Hierro in Mexico City, this week, alongside the brand’s popular beauty offerings.
“It all goes back to our founder,” Gordon said of the connection between fashion and beauty. “If you think of that Warhol painting of Mrs. Herrera, the eye and the lip are just as important as the dress….And my mood board is not just pictures of art or clothing, it’s also faces or an eye.”
Carolina Herrera is the number-one fragrance brand in Mexico for 2024 and 2023, according to Circana, and while the resort show won’t introduce a new beauty product, it is a chance to present a 360-degree view of the brand. The event ties fragrance and beauty to fashion, maybe not to the extent seen at the Balmain spring 2025 runway show in Paris, where Olivier Rousteing teased extensions into lipstick and nail care with looks featuring red mouths and painted fingers, but in expanded storytelling.
“It’s all about the geometry to me,” said Gordon, pointing to a sharp eye line done with the brand’s Mascara Pencil, and to look one, a blush pink silk faille dress with a marigold circle motif on the skirt mimicking the setting sun. (He’s also doing interviews about beauty.)
Gordon has traveled many times to Mexico City. “It’s an incredible market for Herrera, and it’s one of those places where the sights, sounds, smells, everything is intoxicating and inspiring. And for this brand, which is so much about color, it’s the most colorful city.”
Indeed, the palette of the collection hints at everything from Luis Barragan pink to wrought iron balconies in Palanco, colorful taco stands to Mexico City’s Mercado Jamaica flower market, with a lot of Gordon’s trademark colorblocking; plenty of easy, wearable dresses, blouses and pants, and a few flamenco ruffles.
Gordon collaborated with the Mexican Ministry of Culture to bring four Mexican female artisans into the creative process. They made several one-of-a-kind pieces interwoven into the collection, bringing the art of embroidery, talavera blue glaze ceramics and painted jícaras to ready-to-wear and accessories, including an oversized blue and green floral and animal embroidered blouse worn with cigarette pants, which was embroidered by María de los ángeles Licona San Juan, Maestra N?h?u, hailing from El Nanthe in Tenango de Doria, Hidalgo. The artisan pieces will be available by special-order through Herrera.
“This is amazing, very emotional,” said Maria Maestra, of the experience. The artist has been embroidering since she was 14 years old, trained through her community.
The show also introduced a first-of-its-kind for Herrera collaboration with Frame denim, which came out of Gordon’s friendship with that brand’s cofounder Eric Tortensson and his wife, Imaginary Ventures cofounder Natalie Massenet.
“Natalie wears a lot of Herrera, and she said to me, ‘I always wish I had a great pair of jeans to go with my Herrera tops — like a non-dressy bottom.’ So we started talking, and we did it.”
There’s a high-waist jean, tailored jacket, denim ball skirt, corset miniskirt and midi skirt, crafted in several colors including Herrera red, marigold, cranberry and white.
“The thing about a destination show is it really is like a family reunion, with everyone we work with, all the different components of who we are as a house,” said Gordon.
Mexico was a natural choice for a destination show because it is among the top 10 markets globally for Spanish beauty and fashion company Puig, which bucked the luxury slowdown by notching 11.6 percent like-for-like sales growth in the third quarter, beating market expectations.
The Carolina Herrera brand also has a 30-plus year history in the country. Fragrances have had a presence in Mexico since the 1990s and CH Carolina Herrera entered the Mexican market in 2004, with the first CH store in the country opened in 2006.
The Carolina Herrera fashion brand has been selling at specialty store Frattina in Mexico City since the early 2000s, but the El Palacio de Herreiro pop-up is the first time the runway collection will be available at the department store, which previously has only carried CH by Carolina Herrera and Carolina Herrera fragrance.
“It’s a market that is very important within our portfolio,” said company president Emilie Rubinfeld, pointing out that Puig has offices in Mexico City. “And having a collection that celebrates Mexico from a cultural perspective is so important to us.”
While the 2024 resort collection was presented in June, on the industry timeline, this one is being shown just as the clothes start to ship “so it’s more aligned to when the consumer can experience the collection,” said Rubinfeld. “I’ll let you know in a couple of weeks how that pans out. But we have had great support…This is a project where we have our retail clients coming, our retailer partner clients coming, and our retail partner executives coming. And they’ve all really mobilized to be communicating to their network that this is happening.”
Storytelling and content opportunities are enhanced around destination shows, and Herrera had several leading up to the big event. On Wednesday night, the brand hosted clients, retail partners, influencers and press at the Luis Barragan modernist masterpiece Casa Pedregal for cocktails and dinner from hot Mexico City restaurant Contramar, as well as plenty of photo ops.
This time, Herrera is poised to convert attention into sales of the resort fashion collection which has a wide delivery window from October through January. Beauty is also front-and-center as part of the event, which invited not only fashion influencers, but male and female beauty and fragrance influencers to help tell the brand story.
At some luxury groups, where beauty operates through a licensee, the image of fashion and beauty can be quite disjointed. But with Herrera being wholly owned by Puig, it’s more seamless, with the colors, imagery and packaging in harmony with the clothes on outdoor billboards around town, at the El Herreiro pop-up shop and another one at the airport featuring a cross-brand experience.
“It’s really something that distinguishes us and makes us special,” said Ana Trias Arraut, chief brand officer at Puig overseeing Carolina Herrera, Dries Van Noten and Nina Ricci. “When you have this whole celebration of the brand in countries that are particularly strong with [Carolina Herrera] beauty, which is the case in Brazil and Mexico, it makes the consumer understand the whole brand even better…not only in the short term but the long term.”
“And being able to do it with a strategic collection like resort, not being tethered to New York Fashion Week where we’re sharing the limelight with a lot of different brands is key,” said Rubinfeld. “We’re one of the few American brands leaning into destination shows, so we kind of have this platform to ourselves.”
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