From June 5 to September 6, 2026
Design, Fashion and Architecture Program
Curator: Rodrigo Santoscoy

Artists:
Pía Camil, Edgar Cobián, Mella Jaarsma, Mike Kelley, Sarah Lucas, Yeni Mao, Balleth Meccanicue, Guadalupe Montes, Maximiliano Ruelas, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Urara Tsuchiya, Sentimiento.

Juan Soriano Gallery

A Levi’s commercial from the year 2000 shows two young people reclining nude on a sofa. As they exchange caresses, they begin to dress one another, performing a fluid choreography. They begin with a sock, which is slowly and provocatively rolled onto a foot. An overhead shot captures them tumbling onto the floor, intertwined in a kiss, while a brassiere is fastened at the young woman’s back. As their hands continue running over their bodies, a pair of blue jeans are fitted onto some hips. Their caresses blend in with the different pieces of clothing they put on. With frenetic intensity, the action speeds up until we finally see two bodies entirely clothed. The scene creates an alloy of the act of dressing and the pleasure it affords, revealing the force of our desire to cover our bodies.

Modern Western institutions ―such as hospitals and health clinics― have undertaken to regulate the body through strategies of mastery and control. To this end, agendas have been established that distinguish between civilization and barbarism, between what can be prescribed and what is to be rejected. One of the principal consequences of this has been the regulation of desire. Desire, an aspect of private life, moved into the sphere of the public interest, delimited by secular values regarding gender, race, and social class. It is not by chance that clothing is considered one of the most efficient tools of biopolitical control: clothing a body is a desire in tension with the society that regulates its behavior.

In an essay on nudity in film, cultural critic Susan Sontag has underlined the symbolic power of clothing, pointing out that to undress a body is tantamount to stripping it of its identity. This is not just a simplistic observation: Sontag finds that the act of dressing has a transformative potential. It is important to understand that the sign is the perceptible association of an idea, composed of two elements: signifier and signified. While one of these embraces material, sensorial qualities, the other brings together contextual associations. Nevertheless, in understanding clothing in terms of symbolism, it is fundamental to grasp that it not only has the power to transform but can also, at one and the same time, challenge and reinforce established values.

Historically, clothing has been constructed in terms of its utilitarian and cultural relations with the human body, serving the purposes of protection, modesty, and adornment. This transaction consists of revealing certain parts of the body while concealing others. In this way, clothing is a second skin that rests on a naked body. The skin ―the body’s largest organ― is sensitive, vulnerable, and exposed. Although it belongs to the biological sphere of human existence, it is also charged with political details that situate it in the cultural sphere. If clothes are a second skin, a clothed body is an expression that reflects the political relations intrinsic to that skin.

Clothing a body is a polysemic mechanism that reinforces, challenges, and transforms simultaneously. On the one hand, it satisfies our desire to modify the existing order, while on the other it condemns us once again to parading the emperor’s new clothes.

Rodrigo Santoscoy