Photography by Liza Sokovnina & Barragán
In Western fashion, from Vivienne Westwood’s punk in the 1970s to Alexander McQueen’s theatrical runways in the 1990s, shock has been used as a blade, cutting into social class, troubled history, systemic violence and the deformed human body. Yet when there’s no idea behind the cut itself, provocation collapses into just another photo dump.
Berlin Fashion Week was born in 2007 out of streetwear trade shows and mass‑market gloss, in a city proud of being arm aber sexy — "poor but sexy," the phrase Klaus Wowereit coined as mayor in 2003 — where the real runway cut through techno clubs and squats. In recent years, it’s been rewired: the Berlin Senate, Fashion Council Germany and creative bureaus like Reference Studios, the Berlin agency behind much of the city's fashion-week strategy, have upgraded that street‑level festival into an international platform, crystallised in initiatives such as Berlin Contemporary, a curated showcase for the city's designers, and RAUM.Berlin, its accompanying trade and showroom platform. This season, that conceptual laboratory became the stage for Barragán returning after three years of silence.
Victor Barragán is a Mexican designer who first emerged in mid‑2010s New York with a label that started less as a conventional brand and more as performance. The brand grew out of DIY T‑shirt brand under the name ytinifninfinity using internet culture, corporate logos, pop imagery and evolved into a ready‑to‑wear line built on de-constructed silhouettes, provocative graphics and unexpected combinations that disregard gender confines and combine Mexican heritage with New York counter-culture and queer aesthetics. His recent collaborations (e.g. with a Palestinian label Trashy Clothing) explicitly confronted US imperialism and built Victor a cult reputation for turning shock into social commentary.
Mexican foreign affairs institutions have spent years trying to push the country’s image beyond drugs and cartels. In 2019, then Secretary Marcelo Ebrard warned that narco-themed series dominating Mexico’s global image “don’t do us justice” and pushed for a coordinated diplomacy strategy to promote different narratives abroad.
A venue defined by borders and bureaucracy promised a new layer to Barragán’s long‑running dialogue with narco culture and capitalism. And the title of the collection “SS30” is equally loaded: a world imagined after the current Trump administration at a moment when relations between the US and Mexico are again strained by border politics, security agendas and competing narratives about violence.
Models appeared from deep inside the building, as if exiting a migration‑control corridor, with visible scars, blood and dirt‑stained garments, hands restrained or hidden, rushing through the space rather than posing. Sports shorts and knit T‑shirts offered no comfort. They locked the body into labour — limping, running, syncing with others, carrying objects and the weight of graphics that mocked the idea of safety promised by the governments.
We saw ragged flags, crooked slogans shouted hate, addiction and systemic trauma. Dollar‑printed speedos, “meth” prints and Catholic crosses marched past a diplomatic façade, summoning narco capitalism, chemsex (sex under the influence of hard drugs, a controversial practice closely tied to LGBTQ+ nightlife), queer desire, state power and religion in a single sweep.
Hands buried in pants signalled disassociation, compulsive pleasure, loneliness. Three faceless heads sharing one hoodie folded individuality into a single, heavy-footed shape. Taken together, these looks felt like a visual language for stripping subjecthood, turning people into statistics, case files, line items in reports on drug epidemics, crooked economies and migration.
it pointed at many wounds without choosing one to truly stay with, offering a panorama of atrocity rather than a clear point of view. We get the crooked, frantic walk, the “meth” print, the bruised bodies, the embassy as a stage — and then nothing beyond the gesture. Was it just a provocation designed to travel well on social media?
At the Barragán show, the shock reads exactly this way, less like critique and more like content strategy. Saying the most incendiary thing in the room without any structure to hold its consequences. Combined with unresolved controversies around past projects, Victor’s “edge” starts to blur into the exploitation of shared pain. The problem isn’t that Barragán touches these topics. It’s that he touches all of them at once and refuses to stay with any. Trauma is everywhere in the imagery but nowhere in the thinking.
It slips easily into emulation — or into mockery of people who are already extremely vulnerable. Staged from the safety of an embassy foyer and consumed as sensation, bruised bodies and a "meth" tee are not automatically an argument about vulnerability. They can just as easily be its costume.
Barragán himself claims provocation shall be attached to a clear idea. He wants clothes to say something, not just look wild. In Berlin the show reached for so many issues that the argument never fully crystallised. If it was made for visibility alone — more posts and more discourse
And we know a different kind of provocation. McQueen horrified the world and held a mirror to it, his spectacle anchored in a coherent reading of human cruelty. Matières Fécales garments unpacked waste, ecology and body decay with a clear conceptual spine. Their shock has craft. Shows that truly cut into reality choose a wound, name it, and build a form that holds it, instead of throwing the entire catalogue of contemporary horror onto the viewer.
And for fashion to thrive as critical practice in a world consumed by violence and war, its shock has to do more than hurt — it has to be specific, thought‑through in craft and material, capable of holding together the reality it cuts.
