The Cool Drop: Designs Meaningfully Touched By Latin Roots
Female-founded clothing and jewelry shaped by Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico.
As an Angeleno, and before that a Chicagoan, Latin culture has always felt inseparable from the cities I’ve called home. In the food, the music, the fashion. In the rhythm of the streets. It is not an accent to these places. It is foundational.
Never once did I question hearing Spanish spoken beside me in a grocery store or at dinner. Our cultures overlap. They influence one another. They coexist, as they have throughout the history of this country.
But in today’s political climate, many individuals who have planted roots in the same soil I have are being told they do not belong. Families who built lives here are being treated as temporary. Disposable.
It is our right to question policy. It is our right to stand beside our neighbors. And it is our responsibility to acknowledge the cultural contributions that shape the cities we claim to love.
This week’s Cool Drop is rooted in that acknowledgment. Designers and founders whose Latin heritage informs not just where they live, but how they create.
Susana Vega
Founded in Venezuela in 2008, Susana Vega’s brand extends beyond jewelry design into full visual storytelling. Her journey began in her family’s jewelry shop, making this more than a business. It is continuation.
Her pieces carry color, texture, and vitality. They feel rooted in heritage but unbound by limitation. Jewelry as celebration, and as inheritance.
Michelle Del Rio
Daughter of a Chicano and Indigenous father and a Colombian mother, Michelle Del Rio’s work feels deeply personal. Her collections are not simply constructed from fabric, but from research, reinterpretation, and lineage.
I discovered her through the Popz Spring/Summer 26 collection, described as a study in heritage expressed through silhouette. Ease meets attitude. Structure meets memory. The pieces feel considered in a way that suggests they could only have been made by her.
Avemus
Based in Mexico, Avemus describes dressing as “an act of connection between who we are and what we aspire to be.” That idea alone is reason enough to pay attention.
The silhouettes hover just outside minimalism. Natural fabrics sculpted into forms that feel familiar yet unexpected. Nothing overly decorative. Everything intentional. A quiet assertion of identity through shape and material.
Zut
A long-standing C’est Cool favorite, Zut was founded by two Colombian women more than thirty years ago. Specializing in leather and suede, each piece is crafted in their Bogotá workshops.
The designs are informed by ancestral practices, translated into objects that feel both contemporary and enduring. Timelessness that still feels alive.
Alexia Ulibarri
Based in Mexico City, Alexia Ulibarri creates garments that are unapologetically expressive. Her work is flamboyant in the best sense of the word. Joyful and emotional.
Her collections often explore what it means to be a woman beyond the garment itself. Not simply dressing the body, but acknowledging the woman within it. You can feel that she loves what she does. And that kind of energy is contagious.
Culture is not abstract. It lives in what we wear, in what we build, and in what we pass down.
And in times like these, it feels especially important to highlight the creators whose roots continue to shape the creative landscape far beyond borders.
Thank you for being here,
Kelly