Paul Garcia de Oteyza and Caterina Paneda
Breaking the rules of Fashion
Behind OTEYZA’s traditional suits and cape specialist clothing brand, founded in 2011, are designer-duo Paul Garcia de Oteyza and Caterina Paneda. They have thrived in Italy and Spain– making a pit stop by the Pitti Uomo Salon in Florence and Madrid Fashion Week, and now they have their sights on Paris. Spanish fashion is characterized by both its creativity and the big fast fashion companies. OTEYZA, however, is a rare exception. Along with Loewe, Palomo Spain and Balenciaga, Spanish designers visit Paris Fashion Week less regularly. Earlier this year, OTEYZA introduced their FW 2021 collection in Remirz de Ganuza vineyard, a wine from La Rioja Alavesa. For this specific collection, the Spanish brand focused on natural elements as a source of creation – which explains their work on texture with merino wool, primarily, and organic cotton. OTEYZA draws their inspiration from the creation of traditional Spanish suits, associating classical lines to a contemporary conception. The brand breaks the rules of traditional outfits to redefine the codes of men’s fashion. Here & There went directly to the source and talked with Paul Garcia de OTEYZA about the brand and his collaboration with Caterina Paneda.
How did you two start to work together?
Caterina’s grandmother and great-grandmother were tailors. My father was closely related to the Spanish merino wool, so organically, nothing else could emerge. We always had this desire to carry out an activity linked to the arts and craftsmanship and linked to sustainable materials. We’ve been carrying out this truth from our families and this authenticity shows in our actions and projects, with a vital perspective on the past balanced with a touch of transgression.
What is your vision for the brand?
OTEYZA draws on all of our inner discourses from the honesty and poise of its lines, to the drive and gravity of its textures and colours. Creating an exercise of continuous progression in the vision of the new paradigm of men’s fashion. It is not about the form of our creations, it is about the life that is in it; it’s about the process. OTEYZA works the space in a disjunction of passive and active lines that converge and diverge, creating new codes of elegance.
Where do you draw your inspirations from?
My space of creation is the distance between a piece of paper and a pencil, it can be anywhere, the dance begins when the pencil moves with determination and dance!
As a duo, you must complete each other in some ways, is it challenging to work together?
Of course, it’s challenging, but it’s also much more enriching and sustainable this way! Fashion is a game of balance and limits, the most important is that the equation does not break. The source of creation and inspiration provokes the outbreak of memory and joy of modernity.
Words by Alexa Bouhelier-Ruelle
Photos provided by designers
