Ana Locking
Ana Locking is a prêt-à-porter firm founded in Madrid in 2008.
Ana’s love of fashion emerged at an early age in the best school for a fashion designer, her mother’s dressmaking studio, where she grew up among patterns and fabrics. This had a subconscious influence on her future development and expertise in the fashion world. Ana studied Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, where she worked on her visual approach to the world and developed her passion for beauty, quality and creativity. Her consistency and passion for art and fashion underpin her belief in the importance of equal opportunities through determination and hard work to make dreams come true. This universal, timeless wish to make dreams come true is something with which Ana identifies and which defines her entire life experience.
Ana Locking is a firm committed to fusing craftsmanship and experimentation, linked to conceptual ideas and that pays attention to detail, always with a view to practicality. The concept of each collection is a manifestation of the inspiration drawn by Ana from her vision of contemporary art, youth culture and personal experiences from her own life.
The materials and fabrics for each collection are carefully selected and created to make garments with an emphasis on quality tailoring. The juxtaposition of hand-crafted details, quality fabrics and experimental design are the hallmarks of this firm.
Ana Locking has played a key role in revitalising Spanish fashion in recent years.
She won best designer at MBFWM (Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Madrid) with her first collection, which established her as one of the most exceptional talents on the Spanish fashion scene. Ana Locking has won the L'Oréal Paris Awards for the Best Collection at MBFWM on two occasions, the Marie Claire Grand Prix for the Designer of the Year, the Cosmopolitan FFF for the Best Spanish Designer of the Year, the Medalla al Mérito en las Bellas Artes (Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts) of Castile-La Mancha, among others.
Apart from her work as a fashion designer, Ana continues to explore the art world, collaborating with different cultural institutions and arts organisations nationally and globally in exhibitions, installations, video art, photography, seminars, lectures and master classes. Ana Locking has worked with the following institutions: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS); Museo de Arte Moderno de Castilla-León (MUSAC); Instituto de Arte Moderno de Valencia (IVAM); Museo de Arte Moderno de Salamanca (DA2); Museo del Traje, Madrid; Casa de America de Madrid; Canal de Isabel II de Madrid; Instituto de la Juventud de Madrid (INJUVE); Galería La Fábrica de Madrid, the New York Public Library, among others.
Not only does Ana work to develop her creativity in the fashion and art worlds, since 2011 she has also shared her knowledge with aspiring fashion designers at the Centro Superior de Diseño de Moda de Madrid (CSDMM) at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
“I’ve learned that it is crucial not to limit oneself. I’ve always tried to do what I really like doing, however many obstacles I may have found on the way. My work is the result of all my life experiences!” Ana Locking
The Collection
A SHORT STORY OF WEIRD GIRLS
The story behind this collection is based on the excitement of glimpsing other versions of yourself and the feeling of being an outsider in a society where the question of identity seems to not allow for differences. “Anomalies” are disquieting because they draw attention to a feeling of community which is based on the arbitrary criteria of “normalcy”.
We often find ourselves looking for empathy, familiarity or simply social acceptance. Perhaps what we are really trying to do is create a place where women do not have to make an effort to replace or hide the strange, intimate elements that make us who we are. Accepting our own strangeness is a kind of statement and self-affirmation.
This is a story about friendships among women who are capable of embracing the “monsters” inside them and expressing them in numerous ways.
These are monsters that lie beyond gender and which we often hide, but we still love them and even boast about them. They are the real “me” inside us, our irreplaceable touch of difference: these monsters are our most “weird girl” part.
“A Short Story of Weird Girls” aims to subvert identity stereotypes of female identity and to strip away the clichés surrounding women. To do so, I have worked with five aesthetic silhouettes that represent a conversation among five women. With their stories, they write a collection with what initially appears to be disorderly rhythm that eventually becomes a single aesthetic full of nuances, like questions without answers that underline the possibility of freedom of choice, behaviour and the search to build an identity.
“A Short Story of Weird Girls” also contains a powerful feeling of connectivity and community so that, for the first time ever, I wanted to invite several creators to collaborate on processes that surround the presentation of a collection: the stage and the press pack.
Artist Eva Fábregas was in charge of the show’s staging. Her work explores the eroticism of objects and the mechanisms of the engineering of desire. It is an installation created for the occasion in which a series of sculptures with protuberant shapes contort themselves and expand throughout the space to establish a conversation between the inanimate and the organic which invents new fields of sensuality.
The press pack format, which plays an essential role in disseminating the collections, is vital on this occasion because it has become a receptacle of extraordinary stories, interconnected with the collaboration of several guests, women invited from the world of culture to create a multifaceted tale. This conversation appears in a fanzine, a genre with ties to the underground: amateur, hand-crafted, in limited editions and with high artistic value, whether extravagant, weird, marginal, avant-garde or rebellious.
SILHOUETTES
The tailoring is for a Utopian woman and has with a strong idealistic style. Expressed through floral prints, green and black stripes, glitter on tulle and jacquard Viyella with a special look represented in the fabric through the image of feminine eyes. The result is an avant-garde mix with a very different temperament from classic men’s and women's tailoring.
The feminine part is represented in black and white and has clear philanthropic intentions. The use of different textures gives technological pleats a special temperament, jacquard knit and lace with a special hand-painted floral print.
A bolder, more vibrant and cosmopolitan women who expresses her personality with yellow, black and pale pink/beige, with boldly experimental fabrics. The collection features everything from hand-embroidered sequins arranged in colour blocks to braided PVC strips with an intricate woven silk fringe, and metal dresses made of silver mesh with encrusted metal pieces embellished with crystal embroidery.
A woman in gold and silver lamé is vibrant, exciting and passionate. Floaty, draped dresses, generously embellished all around with original metallic, crimped crystal embroidery.
Volume comes from pale beige, light pink and red taffeta pleats, flounces and frills that flutter around the body in the collection's most carnal garments. The result are mini dresses and bodies that represent the most attractive, pleasurable part of voluptuous, sensual femininity.