“In the manner of Luc Tuymans, this exhibition works in that crack where memory fails in the face of the body it remembers, and in that failure, a new body is dreamed up and invented.”
~ Montserrat Albores Gleason
Montserrat Albores Gleason, the designer and visionary behind the fashion practice PTRA, resides along the periphery of the fashion and art worlds. Having studied art and later trained in dressmaking, Albores Gleason is an art curator-turned-fashion designer – a biographical detail that becomes clear through a careful study of her work. Her fashion collections reflect the keen eye and careful mixing of references, sources, and ideas typical of curatorial practice. In her work, concepts converge to form layered narratives and meanings. If the art curator's role is to construct a voice by forgingconnectionsbetween related ideas, and the designer’s role is to merge artistic vision with technical saavy, it is precisely from her position along the periphery that Albores Gleason articulates her most distinctive voice. Her sartorial vision is shaped by an art curator’s thinking and realized through the discipline of fashion design.
PTRA, takes its name from the protagonist of the 1972 film, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a character, who Albores Gleason notes, “can do whatever she wants.” In this spirit, PTRA emerges as a kind of nurturing laboratory, a space in which she grants herself the permission to follow impulses and move freely within disciplines. Here fashion and art do not collapse into one another. Rather, they exist in a state of mutual noruishment, each feeding the other in ongoing exchange. Albores Gleason thrives in this space, inhabiting and disrupting the tension between fashion and art.
In this regard, PTRA becomes a site of practice where ideas are pursued with intensity, and play until they gradually take sartorial form. High fashion and seasonal collections are not the goal; rather PTRA produces garments that are conceptual and experimental. Her clothes contemplate the body – questioning, subverting, and reinventing it. With her most recent body of work, What If Objects Had Memory? themes of possession, remembrance, and the loss of autonomy serve as a conceptual catalyst for her designs. She explores these ideas through three distinct narratives: What if Objects Have a Memory?, The Loss of Autonomy Builds Bodies, and Punk, Posession, and The Dog. Through these concepts, Albores Gleason examines the intimate and often fraught relationship between clothing and the body, as she explores the role of fashion in re/defining it.
At times, garments in this collection are presented as vessels of memory, holding the imprints of lived experience. They function as mechanisms through which mortality is both acknowledged and confronted. In some instances, dresses layered atop one another appear to wear—or carry—other dresses, accumulating into a weight both literal and symbolic. This gesture presents the body as a site of bearing —of memory, of attachment—echoing our ties to the garments we wear and keep, and to those once worn by loved ones who have passed on.They call into question the function of clothing when the physical body has expired. In these looks, dresses hang from the fronts and backs of garments, reminding us that clothes are physical attachments inseparable from ideas of memory and care. Albores Gleason wants us to remember that garments retain memory; a tension constantly negotiated though maker and wearer.
With other looks in the collection, clothes become agents of control and chaos. Several looks on display take inspiration from Dario Argento’s1977 horror movie Suspiria and Luca Guadagnino 2018 reimagining of the film.Imagining dance in sartorial form, Albores Gleason renders a conceptualization of the character Patrizia’s notebooks where relationships between clothing, dance, and the body are explored. She positions dance as a catalyst for the destabilization of bodily autonomy. Here, dance becomes transformative, thus precipitating a deformation of the body itself. This is articulated through the materiality of the garments: fabric is manipulated to twist, stretch, and contort, disrupting the proportion and symmetry of the corporeal form. In several looks, nylon tights—reminiscent of those worn by dancers— stretch and hang, reminding us of the bodies in motion intended to animate the garments. These looks underscore fashion’s role as an instrument through which to shape and reinvent the body. Collectively, these works underscore fashion’s capacity to operate as an instrument of transformation, through which the body is not merely dressed but reshaped, reimagined, and, at times, undone.
Albores Gleason’s collection continues on, and foregrounds the reciprocal relationship between garment and body through the lens of possession. While clothing is typically understood as something owned and worn, her work challenges this notion, proposing instead that garments exert their own form of agency over the bodies they dress. Other looks in this collection draw on the “Do-It-Yourself” ethos of punk—where dress is marked by intentional distress and incompletion—these works position clothing as active, resistant forms of adornment rather than passive coverings. Unfinished seams, altered silhouettes, and visibly torn surfaces articulate a process of intervention in which garments are both shaped by and impose themselves upon their wearer. In this sense, clothing becomes simultaneously domesticated and unruly: tamed into expressions of personal authorship. The resulting looks operate as highly individualized statements, collapsing distinctions between private embodiment and public display.
Taken as a whole, the collection underscores clothing’s capacity to function as a site of corporeal negotiation and reinvention. Albores Gleason’s designs ultimately interrogate how garments come to possess the body, foregrounding moments of subversion, tension, and reinvention between clothing and the bodies they are intended to contain.
Melissa Marra-Alvarez. Curator, The Museum at FIT.