The Beyond Buckskin Boutique is gearing up for the big launch on Monday, May 7, and we've got Virgil Ortiz as our first Featured Designer! Ortiz has been making art for as long as he can remember, and he began experimenting with fashion design in high school. Ortiz, along with his cousin Pilar Agoyo and a couple of other cool cats opened a fashion boutique in the early 2000s in Santa Fe. Called HEAT: A Freak Boutique, this store broke out of the stereotypical 'romanticized Indian' that was commercialized throughout Santa Fe's famed central Plaza area.
Always breaking past the norm, Ortiz's art and fashion designs consistently fuse traditional Cochiti aesthetics and history with our contemporary realities and futuristic visions. And by 'futuristic,' I mean Ortiz is interested in what his pottery or what Native American fashion would look like in the future. And if we can take his word for it, it looks pretty cool.
For the Beyond Buckskin Boutique launch, Ortiz and his manager Tish Agoyo are hooking up Beyond Buckskin shoppers with some sweet, sweet deals - so if you've ever wanted to add some VO to your closet, now's your chance! (and yes, I'm going to have a very hard time not buying up the entire store myself).
The store launches Monday morning, at 6am PST.
Ortiz is a highly acclaimed pottery artist, his work has been featured on the cover of magazines, he even does interior design, he is immensely supportive of emerging artists, and he usually brews up something pretty amazing for Santa Fe Indian Market (and this is top secret - but the buzz is that we can expect another cool project from him this coming August!).
