Underneath the trench coat

(tomorrow) Mercé is a mother

[August 2010, Mallorca]

It was one of those days when the heat was so scorching, that it was unbearable to stand more than 30 feet away from the sea. I went to the water with Gonçalo, reminding David and Afonso that my camera is wrapped in a towel and find Mercé laying on the sand, eyes closed to the sky, her body wet by the saline water coming and going and with her hands under the sand. I whisper “Gonçalo” and look at Mercé’s body, as if it had been left abandoned:

–      Fuck! – we whisper together.

“why don’t you photograph her?” he asks me. I try to explain him that my nerve has limits and that suggesting a photograph to a half naked woman for a blog where clothes are the main theme, can make me pass for a (very, very) sick person. He starts saying “but your blog is much more than just clothes” and as I start to tell him that he’s crazy, my mind starts accepting the idea – after all, our best friends are the ones with the necessary presumption and legitimacy to screw our mind until we do what they consider is best for us – and I remind myself that these are the moments that I appreciate the most. It were moments such as this one that made me start the blog. It’s strange to ask a perfect stranger if we can take their picture, but doing it all the time makes it almost mundane. With some tweaks here and there, we start to get the hang of it and soon it begins to feel like a routine. And like so many other things in this blog, I keep on experimenting and testing so that – at least here – I too don’t fall into routine. And that is what I did. Exactly what I always wanted to do. Fall off routine, and get as nervous as I did when I first kissed someone with whom I thought I would stay (forever?), or when I introduced myself to the CEO of the bank where I work saying something as stupid as “I have a blog”, or when I decided that it was the last time that I was going to be bullied by that jerk from the 7^th grade and punched him twice in front of the whole class (of course that I got home with a black eye and a bleeding nose) or like in so many other times where my actions only had the purpose of making me feel alive. And when I decide to do something that transcends me… it’s like a roller coaster ride where my body just seems to slip away. And what’s curious (or perhaps obvious) is that I think in the person for whom I yelled all those times that I went to an amusement park to feel the adrenaline in my body:

– My mother.

It was her that I searched in all those times that I felt fear, in all those times when my heart beat impaired my hearing. It's her that we search for when, as a child, we talk with our kindergarten sweetheart in the room next door or, as a teen, when we kiss a girl for the first time or even later, when we debut ourselves undressing a woman. The same person in whom we think when we excel ourselves, either personally, professionally or on another level, for example, when I approached Mercé and told her “Hola” while, at the same time, I counted down the time until some 7-feet tall guy would come to me to hit me in the face.

I don’t know if this portrait can be considered fashion... if it will be your fashion. It is definitely my fashion. And my fashion is nothing but my own conception of beauty, of the visual, empirical, emotional or even strictly psychological and social stimulus. And if there were any doubts that this moment was special, they disappeared when, as we said goodbye, Mercé told me (and only then did I realize):

– Mañana seré madre.

That’s when I lost the fear. The fear of publishing this image. Of all the images, this one shouldn’t have caused me that. The image of a woman that is fashion. I don't know if it's yours, but it's definitely my fashion.

(to my mother, Gonçalo's mother, Mercé, her mother and all the mothers of these kids from an island nearby. It were these kids that, in an insomnia night – I’m still fighting the jet lag and the 5 hour time difference – that gave me the inspiration to write a text illustrating an image that I caught one day in a beach in Illetas)

Femininity is such a beautiful thing (Madison Av.)

Brit Girls

Music in the Park

Pierre - the Upper East Side Belgian that wears Italian suits and surfs in...

Carrapateira

Omar

Casual Friday

Mercedes [' Uruguayan cape]

Leonard - a singular man

NYCity flavour

Tom – between the gym and the Rockefeller Center

Benjamin the storyteller

You get such a sense of accomplishment when you´re responsible by a photograph such as this one that if you spent 30 days without taking another one you would feel the top of this page would be well represented. You get the feeling that no matter how many photos you take, you’ll hardly be able to portray someone like that again. So, I told Benjamin “Let me just first take the picture and I’ll tell you what it is for in a second”. And when he answered me “you don’t have to tell me anything”, I told him:

– But I want to [I want you to know. I want you to want this picture. I want you to see what I´m seeing right now. And then…I want you to feel proud of it. Just like I want all the people that I shoot to feel proud when they look at their own pictures. And that´s why I want you to ignore me and keep on doing what you are doing. So you can see what I´m seeing right now. Because, if you see what I´m seeing, you’ll definitely be a (even) happier man]

Jamaican flavour (NYC)

Costanza

(I’m even embarrassed to confess this, but this sequence was left forgotten since that gloomy afternoon when it was taken in December)

If I had a men’s sportswear line, André would be my favorite model for the new collection

La(s) Latina(s)

Maria passed by Rossio

Parq Editorial (women)

Parq Editorial (men)

The girl whose socks seem to smile at her hair

Pedaling through Paris

There’s no Sunday like the Sunday at La Latina (Madrid)

The blue(s) brothers

What Mr. Horácio doesn't know

It was in the half-light of an Italian restaurant in Bairro Alto that I first told my friends that I was going to start the Lisbon Tailor. One of the them laughed at the idea, another, frowning, asked me why the hell would someone want to do that, a third one called me a faggot and the remaining 2 or 3 thought that ignoring me would be the best way to let me know how stupid my idea was. From all of those reactions two consensus emerged: stupid idea, cute name.

I don’t buy tailor-made jackets. Not that I wouldn’t like that. But that would mean having to give up on some trips and of my drunkenness moments, which I consider far more significant to my happiness than the added value of having a coat measured to fit or going to San Giorgio, choose a pattern that best describes what goes on in my mind and ask Mr. Horácio to fit the sleeves so that I can feel comfortable inside a lousy jacket. What Mr. Horácio doesn’t know is that it was in one of those days, when he was busy trying to correct in a jacket what I cannot correct in my own body, that I thought about a name for this blog. The cute name for the stupid idea that I could not stop thinking about. The name of Mr. Horácio’s craft

Paris and how mundane a glimpse of style can be

Truth be told, I would have photographed him even if he only showed half of this neatness

(And from his expression, he knew that very well. Even in Paris, when you leave home like this, you already know that you’ll be noticed)

Some photographs leave me in a good mood for the rest of the day. Photographs just like this one

Federica – a beanie and some Hunter boots (in the end...a more sophisticated and contemporary way of saying "wellies")

The most simple of the styles in the most routine of the tasks in the most common of the days (Brera)

How to keep casual and relaxed wearing a coat and a scarf close to the buttonhole

Mr. Cruz

The fabulous colorful world of Amélie

I already had the movie, the leading actress and her charming craziness, Yann Tiersen, Yann Tiersen's music, the image of the girl in my gym rehearsing to the sound of Yann Tiersen. And as if all that wasn’t enough, I came across Amélia so delightfully dressed. And on top of all that she has a Web site, a Web site that goes with all that I wrote previously

The refinement of the classic man (pinstripe suit and bowler hat)