A new year’s eve conversation, a renewed thinking motivated by experience, a deep analysis on “the system” and the review of some not popular ideology. This is all you have to know about Evanescence, the belligerent collection from G-Darma for the past season.
It was at a New Year’s Eve celebration that Julián López, fashion designer and creator of the G-Darma brand, ended up in the middle of a profound multi-cultural gathering. In that conversation, various topics were touched on, but it was only when they began to talk about world economic systems that the evening became interesting. Sooner rather than later, the subject of the eternal rivals in terms of economic models, capitalism and communism, was touched on. The head of the host family, originally from China, had no qualms about getting up from the table and walking away from the place. In an interview for Goodarma.com, López recalled the experience: “James, my partner’s boss, told me with a smile that his relatives had grown up very traumatized by being left behind at that time, and he was honest with me when he told me that not even he himself understood what What communism really is”.
And no wonder. Even among many members of the communist party, there are strong ideological and fundamental differences regarding the very definition of their political/economic current; and the Chinese regime, deeply rooted in the communist ideology of Mao Zedong, has wreaked havoc on the collective mentality of its people, even reaching far beyond the Chinese communities residing in the United States, and even more knowing that many of those communities reached that country trying to escape from that regime and other similar ones, looking for a better future.
Indeed, communism is a banned topic in many spheres of American society.
In that moment, the idea of Evanescence, a reflection on the ideology of capital, seen from the very process that the creator of G-Darma had when adapting to the North American life system, being a Colombian political asylum seeker in lands distant, arose in Julián’s mind. The collection has as its motto the campaign phrase “All That Is Solid Melts into Air”, taken by Marshall Berman from Karl Marx’s communist manifesto. In the aforementioned interview, López explains: “Berman analyzes the social and economic transformations in modernity, reflects on the impact of capitalism and the ideal of progress as the dissolution of social ties”.
For Julián López, everything was based on the central phrase itself. “All that is solid melts into air”. This phrase, for the designer, was the very idea that visually reflected the current moment in his life. From there, the artistic process began. “I started to imagine G-Darma as a person, like one of those guys who does graffiti with love poems, maybe a friend of Basquiat’s, wearing his cat mask all the time because he doesn’t want to be recognized, walking down the street, watching , wandering in his mind about inclusive wealth generation systems, coming home to paint, to create images that reflect his searches and passions”.
It should be noted that Basquiat, or Jean-Michel Basquiat, was an important American artist of Puerto Rican and Jamaican descent, also known as SAMO, famous for his strong contributions to graffiti as an artistic expression and also for his anti-establishment ideas. In his reflection, López continues talking about G.D., the name he gives to this human form in which the artist imagines his creation: “… He knows that it depends on the economic system, he knows that his opinion is evanescent. So he looks for company, starts his motorcycle and escapes through landscapes to forget the ideas that mortify him in his heart“.
It is important to mention that the central phrase of this collection, “All that is solid melts into air“, originating from Karl Marx, is, in turn, the name of one of the most iconic literary works of Marshall Berman, a Marxist philosopher. and American writer of Jewish origin.
By deeply studying his country, the United States, he has found that cultural links are unconsciously bringing him closer to the south. To South America, to developing countries, to their production schemes, to their rhythm and style. Even, deep down, to the very idiosyncrasies of Latin America. Berman’s postulates in the aforementioned work raise the illusions that something like money and the desire to obtain it can generate in the collective imagination and, even more importantly, in individual thought, making a beautiful metaphor by deconstructing it and presenting it as an evanescent illusion.
“I wanted to use the phrase ‘All that is solid melts into air’ to get people to dare to explore their own reflections on the ideal of progress, and the value of capital in contemporary times, since, paradoxically, we continue to live, at least from my point of view, in that illusion of money that Berman spoke of in his postulates”, reflects Julián when talking about the message he wants to convey with Evanescence.
It is said that all matter deteriorates. Physics converts matter into particles that, after completing their cycle, are transformed into an eternal becoming of entropy. The importance is the awareness about the current time, about the era, the transformation. “So for me, Evanescence is a state of dissolution in the way we relate to capital and its dynamics. That is the message that I would like to leave raised in society“.
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