Cinco to Celebrate: Meet the stylist bringing Mexico City’s hottest designers to NYC

Growing up, César Álvarez, a Mexico City native, was obsessed with magazines. Raised in the neighborhood of Anahuac smack-dab in the middle of the city, he’d spend hours flipping through issues of Eres, a Mexican media brand for young people interested in design. “I loved the fashion, the expression, the idea of creating narratives and stories around music, fashion, photography, looks,” Álvarez tells Time Out.

One thing about Álvarez is that he’s always been the type of person to put his ambitions into action. He started simply by getting some of his friends together and shooting looks for them. Through those shoots, he began to build an online magazine that he named Tótem, a reference to Indigenous totems found throughout North America. Like those fixtures of Native culture, Álvarez hoped to create a record for his community and give a sense that they were worthy of being built up and displayed as pillars for others to revere. Tótem magazine became a fast success, and Álvarez decided to host pop-ups where the designers from the magazine could actually sell their work, thereby creating an ecosystem of emerging Mexican talent. 

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Eventually, Álvarez sought to explore fashion beyond his home city and moved to L.A., where he wanted to build a cultural bridge between the fashion and aesthetic languages of L.A. and Mexico City. In L.A., Álvarez ran a successful show room that was visited by celebrity stylists wanting to source from the hottest designers coming out of Mexico City

In 2022, VANS reached out to Álvarez and asked him to be their global ambassador, offering him resources to work on any projects he wanted. His mind immediately went to his dream of making Tótem a print magazine, and the first issue featured Julio Torres from the comedy Problemista. To Álvarez, Torres represented everything that he identified with: A Latino person doing his best to build a creative life in the U.S..

In recent years, Álvarez has found himself getting positions and opportunities that people like him don’t often tend to get. “Growing up in Mexico in the hood, you don’t even realize what opportunities you’re missing out on because nobody tells you,” Álvarez says. “In Mexico you can see a lot of nepotism, and there’s a lot of people who have amazing talents but have no access or opportunities.” His own background as an underdog in the fashion world informs how he chooses the designers he highlights, who tend to be extremely talented and hard working creatives with zero idea about how to access a bigger audience through marketing or media. In many ways, Álvarez’s most important role for them is to create a thread that connects those designers from the underground and pull them within view for the larger public.

We’re Mexican and we’re proud of that, but we’re also part of the larger world. We deserve to be in the mix. 

Tótem magazine is a way for Álvarez to push out a different vision of Mexican creativity that is not just rooted in stereotypes and tradition. “As a Mexican person, we are our culture: Mariachis, the food, all of that,” he says. “But we’re also affected by globalization. We’re Mexican and we’re proud of that, but we’re also part of the larger world. We deserve to be in the mix.” Arriving at a different vision of Mexican design is also about finding a balance between embracing the things that make Mexican culture unique, while also showing others that Mexican creativity doesn’t have to just draw from the same tiny pool of references (Frida Kahlo as an overused motif comes to mind). 

Throughout Álvarez’s long creative journey through Mexico City and L.A., he had his sights set on New York for a long time. “New York has always been the city I’ve always been in love with because it was the closest to Mexico City in terms of fashion and all of these creative scenes,” says Álvarez. He finally made the big move here last year and has been constantly inspired by all the people he sees on the street. “People in New York are not afraid to be themselves, you can just take the train and see so many people with different styles that just go for it.”

People in New York are not afraid to be themselves.

Álvarez says that living in New York has already begun to inform Tótem’s new creative direction: It’s bolder, more elevated, and more high fashion than it’s ever been. At his pop-ups, Álvarez plans to showcase Mexican designers from the cities he’s lived in and propel them into a new era that folds creatives from Mexico City, L.A., and New York into the same narrative thread. As disparate as these places are geographically, they each seem to have the same concern: How do we display our Mexicanness on our bodies in a way that not only reflects our past, but also imagines our future?

Although Mexican designers will continue to draw from traditional Mexican fashion—from the elaborate, colorful fabrics to iconic footwear (who doesn’t love a good huarache?)—I also want to know what young Mexicans should be wearing to, for example, a club in Bushwick, which, for better or worse, is my more immediate concern when it comes to fashion. To embrace our entirety, we can’t just confine ourselves to what others want to see from us. We have to be bold enough to dictate what direction we want to go in ourselves. In order for this to happen, it feels necessary to put Mexican-Americans and young Mexicans from Mexico in the same room. Or, if you’re Álvarez, to feature them in the same magazine.

Álvarez’s next pop-up is a collab between Tótem Tienda and Assembly New York at 168 Ludlow from 11am-7pm on May 4 and 5. Featured designers will include Paloma Lira, Ese Chico, Anthony Rivera, MUSMIN, Tanamachi, Lick Diablo,  Flubbies, and others.