By Gabriela Afanador
Friday 31, July 2026
There is a specific quality to Medellín during the last week of July that is difficult to describe to someone who has not experienced it. The city is already one of the more visually alive urban environments in Latin America, and when Colombiamoda arrives it layers fashion week energy onto that existing vitality in a way that spills well beyond the official venues. Showrooms in El Poblado, events in Parque Lleras, runways staged at the Jardín Botánico and Plaza Botero and the Coliseo de Voleibol and the building of Empresas Públicas de Medellín, the entire city becomes the platform rather than just Plaza Mayor. This year’s thirty-seventh edition ran from July 25th to 31st and was the first in the event’s history to adopt the full seven-day format of the world’s major fashion weeks, a structural expansion that felt entirely supported by the programming it contained. The theme was Uniqueness is the New Luxury, and more than most fashion week concepts it functioned as a genuine creative directive rather than a decorative slogan, one that ran through the collections, the collaborations, and the conversations of the week with a consistency that suggested the Colombian fashion industry had collectively arrived at a specific and confident point of view about what it is and what it is worth.
More than 70,000 attendees from 50 countries came through the week, alongside 17,000 specialized buyers, 4,000 of them international, and the commercial activity that accompanied the runway programming reflected a market that is genuinely interested in what Colombian fashion is producing rather than simply curious about it. The runway schedule comprised 35 shows across multiple city venues, and 140 city events extended the week’s energy into spaces that have nothing to do with the fashion industry in the conventional sense, which is precisely what makes Colombiamoda different from most regional fashion weeks. It does not ask the city to accommodate it. It moves through the city as though it belongs there, because it does.
MAZ and Manuela Álvarez: Oh My Heart
The opening runway of the week’s official program on the evening of July 27th belonged to Manuela Álvarez and MAZ, and the choice said something clear about where Colombiamoda sees the creative center of gravity of Colombian fashion in 2026. Álvarez has spent more than a decade building MAZ into one of the most genuinely coherent design practices in the country, a house whose language is rooted in sustainability and traceable production and sustained relationships with artisan communities rather than in trend cycles or seasonal novelty, and Oh My Heart was the collection that brought that decade of work to its most complete and emotionally precise expression.
The concept was Buddhist impermanence, the principle that nothing is static and that everything is in constant transformation, and Álvarez structured the collection as a chromatic journey through the stages of that understanding. Black for the denial of grief. Red for the rawness of pain and rupture. Blue for the arrival of acceptance and breath. The raw cream tones at the close for the particular lightness that follows a difficult process fully lived through. The emotional arc was legible without explanation, the palette carrying the narrative in a way that made the clothes feel genuinely expressive rather than illustrative, as though the colors and the silhouettes were the primary language and the concept was simply the translation.
The artisanal intelligence behind the collection was as remarkable as its emotional coherence. Close to ten distinct techniques were integrated across the pieces, among them thermoformed and braided leathers developed with master artisan Mateo Perea, 100 percent cotton horizontal loom weaving by Don Javier García using the characteristic MAZ cordón víbora, new explorations in knitwear and textile printing alongside Sutex, and work with the Camëntsá Biya indigenous community from the Valle del Sibundoy in Putumayo, in direct collaboration with the collectives Curarte and Suma Killa led by Eisen and Teresa Jacanamejoy. What distinguishes MAZ’s relationship to these communities from the more superficial sustainability gestures that fashion has normalized is that the collaborations are structured to develop the communities’ own commercial and creative autonomy rather than their dependence on the brand. That philosophy is not marketing. It is visible in the specificity and the quality of the craft that came down the runway, in fabrics and constructions that could not have been produced anywhere else or by anyone else, which is precisely what Uniqueness is the New Luxury means when it is being executed rather than simply stated.
That Álvarez opened Colombiamoda 2026 in the same year she was selected among the twenty LVMH Prize semifinalists is the kind of alignment that confirms a trajectory rather than launching one. The international visibility and the domestic recognition are arriving at the same moment and for the same reasons.
Palma Canaria: Alba
Palma Canaria and Virgilio Madinah shared the Non Stop by Inexmoda slot on July 30th, and the two collections together made for one of the evening’s most visually complete moments. The set backdrop was a projected sunrise, a warm gradient shifting from deep amber through bright yellow behind the runway, establishing the tone before the first look appeared. What followed moved through a palette of earthy neutrals, camel, sand, terracotta, chocolate, and deep forest tones, the two collections in genuine conversation about the same material world even as they arrived at it from different directions. Structured camel utility jackets with whipstitch detailing, wide-leg trousers in warm neutrals, a deep-plunge crochet midi dress in dark chocolate with a long cascade of natural fiber fringe at the hem, woven artisanal clutches carried alongside the body. The darker register brought strapless feather minis in bronze and amber tones with heavily beaded and fringed bags, oversized coats with crystal and embellished shoulder detailing, layered ruffled skirts in forest green and rust, sequin-bodied pieces that caught the stage light differently from everything surrounding them. The finale brought all models onto the runway simultaneously, the full spectrum visible at once from deep chocolate through khaki through burgundy, and the effect of the two collections together was of a single coherent visual argument about craft, natural materials, and the specific richness of earth-toned dressing that the Latin American fashion tradition has always understood better than most
Agua Bendita: Resort 27
Agua Bendita closed the penultimate evening of the week with Resort 27 on July 30th, and the show operated on a register that felt specific to what this brand does better than most of what surrounds it, which is the translation of Colombian femininity, color, and craft into something that reads with genuine international fluency without losing any of its local specificity in the process. The concept was REGRESAR, return, and the show was linked to an initiative by the Municipality of Medellín to reconnect citizens with emblematic spaces across the city, the runway functioning as both a fashion event and a cultural gesture about the relationship between a brand and the city that made it. The collection comprised six creative universes, each telling a different dimension of the vibrant and artisanally grounded identity the brand has built across more than two decades, and the special drop Felina, developed with Colombian artist Ryan Castro as guest creative director, brought a new generational energy to the presentation that worked because it was added to rather than layered over what makes Agua Bendita already compelling. More than a hundred artisans contributed to the pieces, their work visible in the embroidery and beadwork and handcrafted details that define the brand’s relationship to luxury as something made rather than simply purchased.
The Week in Broader View
Beyond these three collections, what made Colombiamoda 2026 worth attending and worth documenting was the cumulative argument it made about the state of Colombian fashion as a design culture rather than simply as an industry. The week’s most consistent material theme was the elevation of Colombian craft techniques into contemporary fashion contexts, visible not only in MAZ’s indigenous textile collaborations and Agua Bendita’s artisan network but in Alado’s coffee-region collection La Aurora, which built garments from textiles developed from coffee production byproducts and embroideries drawn directly from coffee blossoms and cherries, and in Vélez’s fortieth anniversary celebration, which integrated thermoformed leathers, 3D woven constructions, and the kind of material specificity that only comes from four decades of accumulated atelier knowledge. The week’s fabric vocabulary ran from Italian lycras and metallic satins in the swimwear and resortwear shows through raw artisanal cottons and heritage looming techniques in the designer fashion program, covering enough material ground to suggest that the Colombian fashion system is genuinely diverse in its production intelligence and not simply clustered around a single commercial category.
Juan Pablo Socarrás brought cumbia to the runway with Matilde, a collection that took Colombia’s most iconic popular music form as its structural and rhythmic reference, the movement of the garments on the body echoing the movement of the dance in a way that felt genuinely researched rather than decorative. Chevignon’s collaboration with photographer Ruven Afanador brought a specific visual intelligence to a brand whose heritage is streetwear-adjacent, the pairing producing something that read as culturally considered in a way that not all brand-artist collaborations achieve. La Petite Mort closed the final day at the Jardín Botánico with Puertas Adentro, a collection conceived as an intimate walk through memory and sensibility, the quietest possible close to a week that had moved through considerable spectacle.
What Colombiamoda 2026 confirmed, across its seven days and thirty-five runways and the specific energy of a Medellín in full fashion week mode, is that the Colombian fashion system has arrived at a moment of genuine alignment between creative ambition and commercial infrastructure. The collections shown this week did not need to be apologetically positioned as Latin American fashion. They were simply fashion, with the particular depth and specificity that comes from a creative culture with a clear sense of what it has to say. That is the real meaning of Uniqueness is the New Luxury, and the week made that case without needing to announce it.