Thursday, March 28

Ana Locking transgresses with her version of a traditional piece


Isabel Rodríguez in the besamanos in the Royal Palace on October 12. / Eph

The veteran designer turned five ratatouille handkerchiefs into a commented suit for Minister Isabel Rodríguez at the party on October 12

Glory Salgado

Frisan five decades since Doña Letizia premiered the Cartier tiara. Accompanying one of the great pieces of the royal jewelry box, the Queen put on a night blue dress studded with pearls with strategic openings. A garment considered by Paris Match magazine as the best in the wardrobe of Felipe VI’s wife in 2018, the year in which the publication recognized her as the best dressed queen, giving immense visibility to the author of the dress, the veteran designer Ana Locking .

Four years later the two met. Doña Letizia presented Ana Locking with the 2020 National Fashion Design Award with the delay imposed by the pandemic. A meeting that they repeated last Wednesday, National Holiday. The dressmaker was among the 2,500 guests at the reception at the Royal Palace. Her figure went unnoticed in the hand kisser, but not her excellent work. Isabel Rodríguez, Minister of Territorial Policy and Government spokesperson, wore a design tailored to the woman from Toledo that captured the spotlight of the cameras due to its originality. The style, made up of a bullfighter and a full skirt, was made with pisto handkerchiefs, a piece of traditional clothing.

The relationship between artist and politics does not come from afar. The Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts 2021 went to Ana Locking, a moment that Isabel Rodríguez took advantage of to contact the dressmaker. “She called me to congratulate me,” says the designer in a conversation with this newspaper. «She told me that she would really like to meet me and we ate together one day. We are both Castilian from La Mancha and we talk, among many other topics, about the crafts of the region, bringing out the ratatouille handkerchief». Several months later, the minister called the designer back. “Hey, do you remember what we talked about? How about we do something together for October 12? A proposal that the seamstress did not hesitate a moment to accept.

contemporary styling

An expert in tailoring, Ana Locking took the spirit of folklore to achieve a style with a contemporary air in which materials were essential. For this reason, the dressmaker openly states that she bought five ratatouille handkerchiefs – three to make the jacket and two for the skirt – at a traditional crafts store in Badajoz called Sancha. “The jacket is the hardest thing to do because the scarf has a very specific pattern that had to be matched very well. “It was not easy. In addition, I recreated a kind of petticoat with lace under the skirt, recalling traditional skirts, with the matching blouse». An arduous job of clothing, modeling on Rodríguez’s own body in the few free moments available to the minister. She invested a month of work to “transform, without prejudice, classical tradition into something much more groundbreaking.”

Little could either of them imagine the ‘battle’ between communities in which said styling could derive. But where does it really come from? Of oriental origin, the Kashmir scarf arrived in Spain in the romantic period. “We must bear in mind that there are no coats in traditional clothing, so they resort to mantillas, shawls and all kinds of chest coverings,” explains Concha Herranz , responsible for regional clothing at the Madrid Costume Museum. Until, “due to high demand, they began to be made in Spain, most were imported from England, such as Paisley” – which, like Kashmir, is an ornamental design of Persian origin in the shape of a curved drop. The garment takes the name of ratatouille in areas such as Castilla-La Mancha due to the colorful gastronomic dish, according to the expert, who recalls that “there is a popular saying that similar begets vocabulary.” However, she clarifies, in other regions it is called a scarf of a hundred colors, as in Extremadura, or of a thousand colors, in the case of Castilla y León.




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