WHILE MOST OF NEW YORK rests pregnant with early morning torpor, twice a week, every week Carlos Garciavelez quietly tiptoes out of his Upper West Side apartment hours before the light of day to catch a flight to Boston. In a city most- ly governed by the underground transit commute, it’s quite a trip—especially considering his typical day-length-stays—but for the architect-turned-fash- ion-designer, who lectures at the Harvard Graduate School of Design as a side job—apart from publish- ing two intensive books, one on Latin America’s modern architecture and the other on Mexico’s urban development, just this past year—Garciavelez is used to it.
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“I always choose the same seat. The closest to the front on the right side of the wing if I’m going north, and the closest to the left on the far side if I’m heading south,” he says. “I get to see the clean hori- zon when I’m going through the water or a blurred horizon or one colored pink. There is always the same point at the start and end of each day, but each trip it transforms.” For his debut collection this fall, Garciavelez chose to ponder this idea of the horizon and how it becomes recalled by qualities that he calls “ephemer- al changes.” Through fog, sunset, sunrise, time of day, and the not-so-physical, the familiar linear aspect that we know bends and becomes something anew in even a moment’s glance. Journeying through cites often called otherworldly—be they ethereal as Iceland’s Reykjavik or isolated in the style of Marfa, Texas—the designer set out to translate these intan- gible landscapes into garments befitting a modern “cultural nomad.” It was quite a task for the urbanist’s first attempt at fashion, but then again, he has always taken everything on at full speed.
Garciavelez was born in Mexico City, but grew up with an international hand. He attended boarding school in Massachusetts and earned his undergrad- uate degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, before receiving his Masters of Architecture in urban design at Harvard. Perhaps this, combined with the guidance from his father—an architect too, who works on a global level—is where the self-described “trans-scalar” artist adopted his wanderlust affecta- tion. And fashion? “The love was always there,” says Garciavelez, who also worked at Gabellini Sheppard Associates in New York, known for designing interiors for Jil Sander boutiques, before attending informal construction and textile classes at Central Saint Martins and interning at Alexander McQueen in London.
“I have a very broad understanding of design and sometimes it might feel disconnected, but it’s there,” says the designer. “For doctors there are different aspects of medicine that you can be exposed to, but even if you’re concentrated on just one you still have to stay very aware of everything else. I am that way; my interest lies in design across scales.”
Garciavelez launched his self-titled brand seven months before he presented it during New York Fashion Week this past February. Starting with menswear foundations, Garciavelez engineered formalwear with a sporty energy for the man that wants to one day walk in the designer’s explorative shoes. The sharp structure of his design practice is not lost on the range, which layers tailored hooded blazers over oxford button-ups for a perfectly-posi- tioned play on a visual horizon and details upon closer inspection—segmented neoprene, a trou- ser-jogger, and a strategic label—further reveal the strategic eye of the garments’ maker.
If the high concept does not come across to the collections’ wearers, though, it’s no matter, accord- ing to Garciavelez, whose priority concern is more of ease than idea. “There’s a specific point of view that I’m trying to bring across, but comfort is the number one underlying aspect,” he says. There is a fire to the way the creative approaches everything—from his clothes to coffee table books, even his 6 AM SoulCy- cle class—that reassures this. “I’m the most passion- ate person today,” Garciavelez smiles. “I’m able to do finally what I really, really like, but I’m not leaving anything behind. I’m still kind of doing everything.”
