Elias Gurrola

The Winter Fashion Issue '21

Written by: CRISTINA DEPTULA

Elias Gurrola

FANTASY AND SPICE IN MEN’S APPAREL

Designer Elias Gurrola takes inspiration for his designs from various sources. These include his line-drawn portraits of men and the wide open agricultural fields outside of Miami, where he grew up as a farmer’s son.

He studied art at Central St. Martin’s in London and at Parsons New School for Design in New York, and created a line of custom garments for Henri Bendel in 2013. He competed in Izzue X Tsinghua’s First Annual Fashion Design Award in Beijing and his team won Louis Vuitton’s Technology Award for their dance costumes in a performance during New York Fashion Week.

He showed off his Parsons thesis collection at Pacific Fashion Week in Vladivostok, Russia, which earned him wide media coverage within the country. In 2017, he created costumes for Francesca Harper’s piece “System,” which was performed nationwide with the Dance Theater of Harlem.

Since then he has designed for several brands, including Anna Sui, Jones New York, and Calvin Klein, and has developed a line of underwear and intimate apparel for men.

Nature continues to show up in small ways throughout his work.

I’ve always been inspired by different aspects of nature. The delicate curves of a blossom before harvest, the warm palette of the setting sun, even the beautiful symmetry of bone structure. These have all shaped the way that I think about form, and detail. I used these elements in more obvious ways when I created ready to wear, but that sensibility has never left me, and it’ll show up in the way I cut the back of a bodysuit, so that it just curves and hugs along the wing of someone’s back. One of the first styles I released was my mustard velour brief, and that color always reminds me of the sunflowers my mom would plant at the corner of every crop as good luck for the season ahead.

Gurrola has also continued line drawing, and last year he put together a series entitled Blueprint Memory exploring how we construct a memory of another person.

The series explores intimacy and perception through portraits. Every piece has aspects of incompletion, [as we tend to] keep out parts of someone we decide not to remember and then highlight other parts of their personality. This is all in order to build a blueprint of the person you want them to be, whether it’s true or not.

Gurrola has pioneered the concept of fashion performances, which blur the line between fashion and the performing arts. In these performances, models dance on stage while wearing a succession of different outfits. Both the dancing and the outfits combine to tell a story.

Read more at https://issuu.com/rareluxuryliving/docs/winter_fashion_issue_2021_full_pages/250