The Real Vetements

Through a series of ‘Participatory Garments’—the name the artist gives to her garment-based works—she invites us to examine, in a highly personal way, how clothing prompts certain interactions and connections between people, actions or emotions. In this sense, María Fernández’s pieces invite us to reflect on certain everyday actions that often go unnoticed. In her case, she focuses both on the act of dressing and undressing and on the psychological and sociological implications that garments provoke, whilst showing us how they alter our daily lives. Second-hand clothes are the raw material for her work, and this second life transforms them into a kind of soft machine: capable of immediately sparking our imagination through actions that construct an allegorical discourse with the other. Furthermore, she places interpersonal relationships on the same level as the relationship we have with clothing, since the bond we form with the clothes we wear—which we can change, put away, or choose each day—is often very similar to the one we form with people, even though clothes are objects and people are not. Thus, with Participatory Garments, she aims to make visible the relationships of support, power, affection, violence, etc., that occur between people when we treat one another as if we were objects.