SPFW N60: Rafael Caetano

At the 60th edition of São Paulo Fashion Week, designer Rafael Caetano presents “Fullgás”, a collection that goes beyond the territory of fashion to speak directly with Brazilian literature, music and affective memory. Inspired by the collected poetry of Antonio Cicero, recently published by Companhia das Letras, and by the song of the same name written with his sister Marina Lima, the collection is built as a gesture of homage and continuity, a seam between times, voices and languages. Caetano's path has always been marked by aesthetic and emotional affinity with the world of both artists. In 2018, the designer drew on Marina Lima's album Novas Famílias, and the following year he brought Cicero's voice reciting a poem to the opening of his show “I Can't Take My Eyes Off You”. This new collection, then, is not a rupture but a crowning: a reunion with the sensibility and sophistication that define the work of the poet and lyricist.

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The death of Antonio Cicero in 2024, at the age of 79, rekindled in the designer a desire to go deeper into that legacy. The author's assisted suicide in Switzerland, after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, was received by Caetano as a gesture of lucidity and freedom, themes that also run through the spirit of the collection. “Choosing Fullgás as a title is to celebrate a life devoted to beauty, intelligence and desire. It is to turn mourning into creation”, says the designer.

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The show, presented on Saturday the 18th, gained an additional symbolic weight. The costumes were blessed by Marcelo Pies, the writer's widower, in a gesture that seals the intersection between art, love and memory. More than a tribute, the collection proposes thinking of fashion as a space of continuity, the point at which the body wears thought and thought takes on a body.

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The colours, whites, greys and dense blues, work as states of mind, at times luminous, at times melancholy. There is something maritime and something urban in Fullgás, as though the show took place between the sea and the Ipanema flat where the song was born. Technological fabrics live alongside natural bases, reflecting the designer's desire to unite constructive precision and sensory softness. On the runway, the clothes move like verses, fragmented, sinuous, almost musical. The pattern cutting reveals the artisanal care characteristic of Caetano: structured pleats, bias cuts and juxtapositions that recall the tension between reason and desire present in Cicero's work. The body is not merely a support, but a poetic surface.

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RUNWAY IMAGES 

Credits: Gabriel Cappelletti/ Marcelo Soubhia / Marcelo Soubhia /Ze Takahashi @agfotosite

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