Why Mexican Design Belongs at the Top of the Table

For a long time the adjectives attached to Mexican craft were warm ones. Colourful. Charming. Folkloric. Vibrant.

They sound like compliments. They were doing something else. Each of those words placed the work in a category where it could be admired without being taken seriously, and where nobody expected to pay a maker properly.

What the words were hiding

Behind the adjectives were techniques with four hundred years of continuous practice, held inside families, taught the way a language is taught. In Santa María Canchesdá the ceramic is thrown, fired and painted in the same town by people whose grandparents did it in the same rooms.

That is the definition of a craft tradition. Anywhere else in the world it would be described in those terms.

The tell is the hand

Pick up a hexagonal vessel and look at where the brush turned a corner. The line thickens slightly. On the next piece it thickens somewhere else. The glaze has pooled a fraction deeper on one facet than another.

Industrial luxury spends enormous effort eliminating exactly this. Then, at the very top of the market, it spends more effort putting a version of it back, because buyers eventually notice that perfect surfaces have nothing to say.

Here it was never removed. That is not a strategy, it is just how the work is done.

Restraint, which nobody expects

The other assumption to drop is that Mexican means loud. The palette we work in is closer to bone, ochre and a deep green — the colours of the landscape the clay came out of. Placed on a table in New York it does not announce a country. It just looks considered, and then someone asks about it.

Where it sits now

Mexican design has stopped asking permission, and the people buying it have stopped needing a story about authenticity to justify the purchase. They buy it because it is better made than the alternative.

See the town, or the pieces.