A publication for Renato Bras collection 01, Fragmento. Images, design, fabrication, consultancy, text. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––> FRAGMENTO BOOK
If he had it his way, maybe no one would ever see his clothes, or maybe not for some years. He is like the painter Hilma Af Klint, a visionary potentially convinced the world isn’t ready for his bodily vision. At confession, he admits “putting in a stitch is like writing a word in my diary. And there is only so much in a diary you want to read in front of a crowd.” Designer Renato Bras prays at a different temple, one where the priest looks like the artist Christo and all the chasubles are made of Portuguese wool, or knit by a one-woman operation in his hometown of Abrantes, located in the center of Portugal. This level of eccentricity, if that’s even the right word for it, is so easy to understand except for the fact this it means Renato is constantly traveling in 500 different directions each heading back to the same place: home.
By embracing his heritage—the images and pieces of familial ephemera which connect him to loved ones passed and living—Renato Bras is connecting himself to the land from which he comes. Portugal is a country with a rich history of textile making. It is quite literally the hands of fashion, with houses across Europe like Givenchy or Chanel where the designer interned in the textile studio, pulling on the nimble fingers of Portuguese craftspeople. Renato grew up on a slice of land on the same street as his aunties, one of seven neighboring parcels split by his great-grandparents keeping together a literal family line. There, a young Renato sat outside with these women, crocheting and making small handcrafts, watching as his grandmother’s fingers pin lace patterns for doilies and table dressings.
“Getting to know people that make textiles in Portugal itself has made me realize the importance of like keeping these crafts alive. A lot of heritage is dying in Portugal, factories are closing.” Renato worked with Burel Factory, a revitalized enclave of wool makers in the heart of the Serra da Estrela mountains in in the Mantiegas region. The factory’s namesake textile became backbone of his collection, becoming the base of trousers, corseted tops and floor-length dress. The hardy wool embraces the curvatures of the body in a reflection of the mutual support between designer and material.
Fragmento has become the way Renato is picking up the pieces, both of an industry in need of international representation and his own family history. “I think it's my responsibility to keep these techniques alive, which are not necessarily from Portugal, but they exist there and they're part of the fabric of our everyday lives.”
At first, Renato never felt like he had enough to draw from conceptually, but by looking back to his country the designer realized that inspiration was already coursing through his veins. Once he began to channel that through needle and thread, communion between the past and present became natural. Together with a Portuguese artisan names Teresa, Renato reinterpreted several Japanese-originated knit patterns for an asymmetric jumper worn over a cream-colored and corseted jerkin. Over that flows a mohair piece inspired by a crocheted textile the designer found at a carboot sale in Lisbon. The linked lace florets of this tablecloth were transformed into wooden rings hand crocheted in mohair yarn, whose deep blue and glinting white streaks evoke the turbulent Portuguese sea.
His clothes may be physical manifestation of this childhood environment—the fishing rope that flows in Portuguese waters, the wool on the back of a lamb or even something as forgotten as a derelict doorframe on the side of the road. “In Portugal,” he says, “everything has always looked dated to me, and things are very decayed. That’s the aesthetic, so I never had to consider that because it was surrounding me. Now, I miss that a lot, the sort of rundown-ness that is so beautiful in a non-pretentious way.” There is a certain level of intangibility to the clothes, something that is so emotional, that doesn’t come from shyness but rather a natural ability to communicate a cavernous sense of longing for home.
These are not easy clothes; they are born of obscurity and specificity. They are not hot pink, and they won’t scream at you for attention. Before he began developing his sculptural experiments on the body, Renato thought he would take a different path: “I wanted to be an architect. I would drop any of this to be an architect, I feel like this is all linked.” Little did he know that this flirtation with architecture would lead him down a similar path to Pierre Cardin, Tom Ford and Rocksanda Illincic, all for whom the structure of clothing was introduced on the drafting table. This is why Renato makes objects beyond fashion. They are sculptural, and for now, wearable. But because the clothes are not tethered to the body, they transport us somewhere else.
At his exhibition, a woman walked over to Renato, who was dressed in all black next to the gleaming brightness of the calico-clad box housing his dress behind. As the light streamed though illuminating a silhouette, inspired by the quenelle-neck swimsuits his mother used to wear, caressed by blue aquatic macrame, she talked about how she’s a neurosurgery student, and how it took her ten minutes to figure out what he was saying. “Everybody is trying to put on a show around the clothes, but I'm saying ‘no, the clothes are enough’. I’m not scared that nobody is going to understand it.”
He had never cried before about his own clothes, but sitting alone with him on a sunny afternoon he did. “I hope in 20 years my ideology will be the same,” he said, “Integrity is the most important thing to me. In Portugal, people live and don’t have time to compromise themselves.” The pressures of social media and designing for the internet are something that Bras will never do. The closest he’s gotten to technology is a TC2 knit machine operated by a neighbor in Portugal, where a digital pattern is hand-loomed and knitted in two colors. The piece that came out of this is a rectangle of fabric, backed by tapestry canvas; a photograph of his grandfather who passed away a week before Renato was born makes up the image, which was sent with a letter written on the back to his grandmother. When worn, it’s like you’ve walked into a painting as the fabric molds around the body, held up by two red cords—like being wrapped in memory.
Renato is willing to take the time to let himself develop, echoing the lengths it will take and has taken for the Portuguese fashion industry to gain any semblance of recognition for its role—Hopefully it won’t be half a century as in Hilma Af Klint’s case. Maybe it will start in a Central Saint Martins tutorial room with Sarah Gresty remarking LVMH could be opening its first Portuguese brand in the near future. Maybe it begins in June after a flurry of press following Renato’s debut at the BA Fashion show; maybe it will take an MA and years of work to get his brand off the ground. Or maybe it belongs in a museum.