Carla Fernández: The Barefoot Designer: A Passion for Radical Design and Community will explore the traditions and techniques of indigenous Mexican artisans and how they can be applied to modern fashion and styles.

Carla Fernández has gained international recognition for her extraordinary approach to documenting and preserving the rich textile heritage of Mexico's indigenous communities by transforming it into beautiful contemporary clothing, and proving tradition is anything but static.

This first-ever fashion exhibition at the Gardner Museum explores the development of a new language in visual design that Fernández has built over two decades. She uses a method called "the Square Root" based on the Mexican tradition of making clothing from squares and rectangles. This process emphasizes forms of fabric and delicate, thoughtful construction based on whole fabric, as opposed to cutting in curves and molding to the body.