Meet Tótem, the Collective Reimagining the Meaning of “Community” in Fashion

If you follow the smell of incense and the sound of reggaeton into the heart of Los Angeles’ American Cement Building, you’ll find a colorful showroom full of neon lights, freshly cut flowers, and vibrant treasures. Something about the contrast between the building’s brutalist concrete façade and the wonderful sensory overload that is Tótem’s showroom simply makes sense. This is the gem that is Tótem Tienda, the retail destination of Tótem, a Mexico City-based collective whose mission is to support emerging queer and Latinx designers of color.

“It’s really all about community,” says César Álvarez, who founded Tótem in 2014. The digital publication, IRL store, and e-commerce site first began as a series of pop-ups that aimed to help small designers sell their merchandise: “It was all very DIY, and all we wanted was to help people sell their pieces when there was no other place to do it,” he tells Them. “This is when we started to truly become a community, just friends and friends of friends coming together.”

“Community,” as it happens, has become one of fashion’s favorite buzzwords. You’ll see it in initiatives used by brands to disguise the straightforward nature of a good marketing strategy; take Dior’s Fall 2022 campaign, which looks to exalt a “sense of community and sisterhood,” or Valentino’s Narratives series, which taps authors and book clubs as “a proactive approach to ‘giving back’ to the community, and the places where literature dwells.” Yet for nearly a decade, Tótem has been pioneering a community-focused approach to fashion that’s far more than a marketing term. For Álvarez and his team, it’s at the core of what they do.

“We really care about each other and the work that we do,” Álvarez tells me. “We want to support the designers, but they also want to support us — we’re a family.” That much is obvious when you see how deep their collaborations run. The mainstay designers in Tótem Tienda, like the Mexican jewelry brand PONN, are also featured in the collective’s editorial work; PONN made its way onto the April cover story of Tótem Magazine next to more established designers like Gypsy Sport. In Tótem’s world, brands with clout exist naturally next to the work of folks who may not have access to it, and a network of writers, photographers, models, designers, and other creatives come together to promote others they love. The end result is a more democratic, collaborative approach to fashion — in other words, something the fashion industry desperately needs more of these days.

Today, Tótem’s network of collaborators has expanded to encompass Mexico City, Los Angeles (where Álvarez is based), and New York City, all with the goal of highlighting the work of independent Latinx designers, challenging fashion’s status quo, and encouraging folks to think outside the box.

This cross-continental approach has become a significant part of the group’s success, and has helped the designers it hosts to grow their businesses. “Working with Tótem has meant a lot for us,” Toshi & Mau, designers of Mexico City-based apparel brand Tanamachi, tell Them. “It was the first time we sold our pieces in a store, and it was the first time our pieces were sold outside of Mexico.” Similarly, Tamara Guirao from Lick Diablo, another brand Álvarez often hosts within the Tótem ecosystem, says that she went international for the first time through the platform — and that this helped her to think differently about everything she does, from logistics and production to content creation. Yet Guirao says the biggest impact has been finding kinship and a group of folks who “share not only the same roots but the same values and passion.”

“For me, the focus when curating the showroom or styling a shoot is to ensure the people we are working with share our values. At the beginning, I used to work with pretty much anyone that was down to be a part of Tótem, because that’s being inclusive too, right?” Álvarez says. But over time, he became more selective: “If you think a certain way that feels… old school, this isn’t the place for you,” he continues. “If you want to create but you’re not challenging anything, that’s fine, but that’s not what Tótem is.”

Take the binary gender categories that still dominate much of the fashion industry, just one example of an “old school” ethos Tótem seeks to dismantle. While brands like Gucci and Miu Miu are more willing than ever to subvert the gender binary in their shows and campaigns, having a shopping experience that's still rooted in the binary means there’s little follow up to that initial punch. “In the end, for us, it’s about deconstructing the education we were given about what is what, but above all about having fun with it and trying things out,” Álvarez tells me.

Álvarez says the group’s approach is less about making a pointed attempt to break down gender barriers and more of a communal effort to have fun with fashion without its usual limitations. Be yourself, enjoy what you’re doing, and if you spice things up and shock some folks, then that’s great. It’s an outlook the fashion industry often underestimates, because it’s seen as less serious — but in reality, it’s how queer folks have always pushed culture forward.

Álvarez also tries to work with folks who aren’t usually reflected in the fashion industry’s lenses. Take Tanamachi, which Toshi & Mau say is a “love letter to Mexico City” that explores “the experiences of being middle-class gay men living in one of the most populated cities in the world.” Guirao, for her part, describes her brand as a “Mexican exploratory laboratory” that’s “turning garments into statements about sex workers and body freedom.” In many ways, the fashion Tótem spotlights — sexy cut-out tops, tees featuring cool psychedelic prints, and trippy jewelry — is as important as the stories these brands are telling.

Having fun does not necessarily build a business, though, and this is where Álvarez says things can get a bit challenging as the group tries to scale their efforts; many of Tótem’s collaborators hold their own full-time jobs, and the retail store doesn’t yet have the same buying power as true wholesalers can command. Yet it’s all a process, and that process seems to be working. Tótem recently launched a collaboration with Vans and has been featured in publications like PAPER and Office Magazine, opportunities Álvarez says weren’t available just a few years ago.

As for the future, the goal is to expand and grow everything Tótem does, from pursuing a true retail space to novel ways to spread the group’s gospel. As part of the upcoming Vans campaign, Tótem Magazine is releasing its first print issue. “We did some photoshoots in Mexico City, some in L.A., and shot the cover in New York, so we got to show how we put these three cities together,” he says. The end result will show off Tótem’s community in all its glory, featuring the work of their collaborators and articles in both Spanish and English, to highlight the intersectional space they occupy.

“Fashion is a tool for communication, expression, and storytelling,” as Toshi & Mau tell me. By creating tools that enable those pillars to coexist, a group like Tótem is helping folks to think a little bit differently about fashion, and let go of preconceived ideas based on gender, geography, and identity. Hopefully, that enables them to also feel freer to be themselves.

“To use earrings, scarves, pants, or skirts as a weapon against structural social norms is freedom,” Guirao says. “And freedom, in my opinion, is the ultimate goal.”

Creative Direction and Styling: César Álvarez
Photo: Tania Diego
Model: Rikki Matsumoto
Makeup: Jessica Díaz 
Hair: Alfonso Aguilera
Nails: Zaira Vega
Styling Assistant: Medusa Moi

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