The Devil Wears Paula
Designer Paula Canovas del Vas on Surveillance and Creating Instagram’s Favorite Shoe
- Text: Claire Marie Healy
- Photography: Dafy Hagai
Paula Canovas del Vas’ studio is attached to a nightclub and adjacent to a canal. Like the Spanish designer’s clothes—square-hoofed shoes, soft tentacular surfaces—the combination makes a strange sort of sense. It’s not unusual for signifiers to jumble in her garments or show settings, or, as it turns out, when you meet her in-person, which I do just before London goes into lockdown. Back then, with her team working around her and fabric swatches and intriguing prototypes spilling out everywhere, Paula somehow created a tranquil pocket of zen in a single corner: pouring loose-leaf tea for two into miniature, knobbly ceramic cups she had just picked up in Paris. The cups were as tiny and as delicate as Paula herself, whose stalkish legs she wrapped one over the other as we sipped, revealing a ladder-snag in purple tights.
You won’t be able to hear the club’s lightly thumping music anymore, but Paula is still going to the studio every day—it’s “literally 10 seconds walk” from her home—while her team works remotely, video-calling and sharing virtual moodboards to keep eachother in the loop. And she is still dressing up. “It has really helped me mentally,” she says. “I put perfume on, sometimes eye-shadow. It makes it feel more natural—like I'm going somewhere for a meeting, even though I'm literally staying inside the entire day, by myself.”
The idea of going one step beyond your daily reality—potentially even stepping right into another—is one that comes naturally to the designer. During Paris Menswear in January, Paula presented an installation in an apartment: “Flat Viewing.” Despite its mundane title, the event housed a tea and incense ceremony, with edible pastry versions of the new AW20 spiked Sofia bags hanging from trees. The effect, altogether, was one of storybook spookiness—“My chef friend replicated the bags in meringue so people could eat the collection.” At “See Saw Seen”—her SS20 Virtual Reality presentation that was open to the public during September’s London Fashion Week—the collection was shown in a misty-pink virtual world with models of various scale, from some just perceptibly smaller than human-size, to 50-foot-women you had to crane your neck to take in. The weirdest thing—even weirder than the fact the models were recognizable through 3D scanning—was how their eyes followed you through the room.
It’s a moment that speaks to the contradictions always found in the CSM graduate’s world: these might be garments-as-soft-play—puffers, ruched knitted mini-dresses, crayon-color tights and skirts spraying neon tulle tubes —but there’s a challenge to them, too. Like the squashy spikes of those new felt bags, these are clothes a little on the attack, that extend themselves out into the world. The greatest emblem of this is her signature shoe, the Diablo: since her AW18 MA collection, the shape has birthed heeled sandals, hairy court shoes, and, most recently, clumpy, girlish velcroed trainers that are astonishingly light. (They’ve even, notably, birthed very famous copycats, as Diet Prada pointed out last year). They remind me of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, whose protagonists don’t have feet with toes, just squares. It turns out Paula has never read it, or seen the Anjelica Huston-starring film, but it still feels like there could be something to this idea: that Paula Canovas del Vas’ protruding, exaggerated clothes are tailor-made for women who know something the rest of us don’t.
Featured In This Image: Paula Canovas Del Vas short dress.
Featured In This Image: Paula Canovas Del Vas tote and Paula Canovas Del Vas short dress.
Featured In This Image: Paula Canovas Del Vas flats.
Claire Marie Healy
Paula Canovas del Vas
I first saw your clothes at the See, Saw, Seen VR presentation. For me, it was such a memorable experience, but also one which I found quite confronting. What were you trying to provoke in people who came and experienced that collection?
This sensation of being watched was the starting point. I feel like the fashion show format has been kept the same really since the 50s. The audience has [always] been passive, the woman being sort of looked at, objectified. It's a very bizarre setting. And I started asking myself, what is it like to be a woman? I spoke with a lot of female artists, friends of mine and asked them what they thought. Very often the idea of being watched popped up, this sensation of being surveilled. I remember being a child and constantly being told “Paula, people are watching… you need to compose yourself.” I felt it could be good to reverse those [roles], and to actually have the audience in the skin of the models, being surveilled and watched.
You’re obviously concerned with how clothes interact with environments, but they don’t forget the body as well. What's the dynamic there?
There is a Japanese concept called Ma, relating to architecture and also clothing. It's this empty space between a building, and the self. And [it’s the] same with the female body and clothing. I liked for that to also be represented in the way we design—I suppose that translates in the way that we make the clothes, in that they’re very outward.
Featured In This Image: Paula Canovas Del Vas clutch.
Featured In This Image: Paula Canovas Del Vas heels.
I have a sweet spot for things that are the marriage between something that's beautiful, and something grotesque.
There’s definitely this feeling of emerging into the world, or “taking up of space.” The bag doesn’t behave like a bag, it extends outwards, your shoe doesn’t just end where it should end, it ends out here. What was the genesis of these shoes?
I have a sweet spot for things that are the marriage between something that's beautiful, and something grotesque. I don't know why, but since I was a child I've always been into these weird aesthetics. All of the artists I would look at, the films I watched—I'm really into this confrontation, because I just feel it resonates with the world and the times we live in. I designed the Diablo with my mother. She is an incredible woman who really helps us, overseeing production. My friends always say because I have such skinny legs I look like Bambi when I wear heels, and then we were drawing what Bambi might wear and it kind of ended up looking like the fin of a shark, and then a friend of ours who actually ended up doing the first prototypes for the shoes gave me a cast, and with plasticine we built the two little spikes on it.
There’s something so childlike in the playfulness of that process. I read that your mum owned a bridal wear business? Did that influence you, growing up?
In the morning she is a lawyer and works for the state, and in the afternoon she has this company making wedding dresses. So I was surrounded by seamstresses, it sounds very cliché. This is in Murcia, in the middle of nowhere in Southeast Spain. My mother is Argentinian, actually, and my father is Spanish, they divorced. My mum had all these friends who were artists and writers and they would always be “cuckoo” according to my father, who was more strict. I grew up in a huge family, like literally when people think of Spain: you enter my house and there's like three pregnant women, fighting children running—there was a real sense of community with all these very hardworking women around. A lot of friends who come over to visit, they're like, “Paula, your life is like a Pedro Almodóvar film.” He’s an amazing storyteller but actually the South of Spain is just like this, very folkloric. From an outsider’s perspective it’s like, “Whoa, this exotic setup, this art direction…” I'm like, “Oh God, it feels like I'm at my Aunt’s house!” [Laughs]
There are going to be a lot of challenges ahead for any independent designers—do you feel like some positives could emerge creatively?
This is a tragic time for the entire planet and I wouldn’t want to undermine it, but I am certain many good resolutions and responses are going to come out of the current situation. The way we connect and communicate has taken an incredible twist in the last few months. Even after we overcome this pandemic, certain behaviours will have become natural to our daily lives. From a personal perspective, I have had some time to read and connect with creatives, other designers, and family, which I would normally not do because of the speed of the industry. I was talking to a friend of mine and she was like “It's very important to be bored for a creative,” so I have to force myself to be bored sometimes because so many good things come from boredom. I’m excited for my boredom.
Claire Marie Healy is a London-based writer and editor, currently Editor of Dazed & Confused.
- Text: Claire Marie Healy
- Photography: Dafy Hagai
- Interview: Claire Marie Healy
- Date: May 5, 2020
