The America Universo SS25 show closed New York Fashion Week’s Monday lineup with an arresting, avant-garde display. Designed by sisters Frida and Irma Hernandez, the collection delved into the human body’s most extreme and surreal forms, creating a visceral experience for the audience. The show presented a fusion of the natural and mechanical, blending the familiar with the alien to create an unsettling yet mesmerizing vision of the human form. Every look pushed boundaries, forcing the audience to confront new perspectives on the body and its relationship to fashion.
The sisters took inspiration from the intersection of the psychological and spiritual body, blurring the lines between human and unhuman. The collection featured hardware corsets reimagined as orthopedic braces, with skin, hair, and metal intertwined in eerie, artificial forms. These prosthetic-like pieces mimicked organs and arteries, creating a vision of cybernetic beings that felt simultaneously futuristic and deeply intimate. There was an undeniable tension in these designs, evoking both discomfort and fascination as the models transformed into something more than human.
The exploration of fetish wear in the show added another layer to the narrative. Elements of bondage, restraint, and medical devices were transformed into high fashion, with latex, leather, and metallic components reconfiguring the body’s boundaries. The interplay between appeal and abjection was stark, with medicinal blues, garbage greens, and bright yellow rubber dominating the color palette.
A recurring theme throughout the collection was the tension between discipline and deviance. Bandages and restraints took on new meaning, with bondage-inspired multi-strapped halters and spike-covered miniskirts representing both vulnerability and power. Models, adorned in flesh-colored latex and draped in cutouts, moved with a deliberate sense of control and ecstasy, evoking the image of futuristic priestesses. The designs balanced a grotesque beauty with sterile detachment, leaving viewers questioning the limits of femininity and control.
Frida and Irma Hernandez crafted a narrative of frigid femininity, drawing from symbols of purgatory and asylum. The collection’s provocative designs encouraged viewers to rethink traditional perceptions of the female body, with cutouts that boldly highlighted anatomy and forms of bondage that empowered rather than restrained. The models, balancing on hair-covered pleasers, seemed to invite both scrutiny and awe, embodying a vision of femininity that was unapologetically raw and unfiltered. The Hernandez sisters created a world where the grotesque and the beautiful coexist, encouraging us to embrace authenticity and challenge the gaze that has long shaped our perceptions of the body.
View the collection in the Gallery below:
