“After you do something and perfect it so many times, what does that look like?”
I first spoke with designer Patricio Campillo a week before his show. It was the final day of fittings, and they were wrapping everything up that morning in Mexico City. His voice carries a note of exhaustion, tempered by the relief that comes only after countless adjustments and fine tuning — all in the pursuit of perfection. On the wall behind him hangs an expressionist painting that his artist friend, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, created of a kitchen party they both attended, in exchange for a couple of Campillo suits. Hung beside the sweeping canvas are much quieter details: a pair of Mexican agricultural straw hats to the left, and a 40-year-old woven bag for carrying fruits to the right.
A creative exchange and a nod to the past: It is this reunion of Mexican traditional craft and new wave that makes Patricio the designer he is. And in a way, his new collection is an exchange that focuses on the act of and beauty in doing something over and over again, like a stroke of paint or cross-hatching of a woven hat.
“I’ve been doing this for a while, and I was very interested in seeing what continuity has been able to give me, in terms of developing a collection, evolving as a designer, and creating the habit of creating,” Patricio tells Teen Vogue. Aptly titled “Repeticíon,” Campillo’s Spring 2026 ready-to-wear collection looks to routine as its muse. By reimagining Mexican intrecciato — a weaving technique often used in basketry — as structural, forward-looking button-ups, bomber jackets, and trousers, his technique and concept stand as one.
A year since his New York Fashion Week debut and nearly a decade since founding his brand in 2017, Patricio views repetition not as a compulsion, but as a discipline and means of refinement. “I’ve done the reinterpretation of the charro suit for maybe eight seasons now. After you do something and perfect it so many times, what does that look like?” the designer asks. “There’s freedom in repetition, because it allows you to create whatever you want with time.”
In his interpretation of Mexico’s charro culture — its countryside horsemen, known as rancheros — and the suiting historically associated with them, it means continuing to keep the past anew. Patricio recalls a childhood of riding horses every weekend and frequenting family friends’ parties in Mexico. His dad inherited charro antiquities from his uncle who, to Patricio’s family, was an image of the ultimate charro, a figure who’s more fable than real to the designer.
In 2020, as Patricio began reflecting on his creative voice and brand, he returned to his family’s heritage, uncovering a charro suit that his grandfather had gifted to the designer’s father on his 18th birthday. “I didn’t know that suit existed, and my dad was wearing it when he was in his 20s,” Patricio accounts, being brought back to formative memories of the antiquity collection. “I’d be wearing that jacket, a tank top, some really tight pants, and Cuban heels. I remember thinking, ‘if this jacket would’ve only imagined what it was going to experience,’” he says, perhaps also wondering how his father felt when he first received the two-piece.
Inheriting the suit laid the ground for all that was to come, as it’s now the base pattern for many of Campillo’s shoulder-padded jackets and pants. He likens the discovery to the first time he rode a horse: his cousin gave the animal a push, and off it went galloping.
The suit was both a starting point for the last half-decade of collections and a prompt on what masculinity means in Mexico — a question that last season’s Fall 2025 collection directly confronts through perversely exaggerated suiting, unexpected fur and leather moments, and feminine silhouettes. There’s tension to the collection, its angst coalescing in the final look: a coat of 2,500 rooster feathers, as seen on our very own September/October 2025 cover star Flau’jae. “You’re going to close the show and you’re going to be our fighting rooster,” Patricio remembers telling the model. To him, the look was an omen of strength, transforming his country’s longstanding cockfight culture into something of beauty and creation.
As with past collections, the element of craftsmanship in Spring 2026 is as strong as ever. This time around, his team developed its own in-house knit with fabric strips. And for the first time, it collaborated with traditional artisans on silk and wool felting techniques, silversmithing hardware accents, and “telar de cintura,” or backstrap weaving. “Being able to co-create pieces, [while] identifying which part of it was craft and which part belongs to another culture, rather than to a singular artist,” shaped the collaborative process, as per Patricio.
Spring 2026’s theme extends beyond technical expertise, though, as “doing something over and over again can be soothing and even therapeutic towards trauma,” Patricio notes of repetition’s way of easing painful memories, of offering salvation in the wake of suffering. If last season’s fighting rooster and cheeky “El Golfo de México” slogan tee were not-so-subtle emblems of strength and dissent, this season’s quieter resilience embeds itself in material and technique. Repetition looks to the whole, then its parts.
As the show commenced on Friday, September 12, in a hushed, downtown studio space overlooking Manhattan’s skyline, the early-evening sun filled the room, illuminating the models in their earthy outfits. Even in firmly-woven jackets and oversized denim co-ords, the garments carried a level of ease and lightness. The closing look featured the collection’s hallmark basket-weave, but this time as a cubistic top, with large woven panels folded atop one another. At once sculptural and light, sturdy and in motion, it was as if a new pattern had begun taking shape.
Skyli Alvarez 