Tomorrow’s Heritage : Fashion Scarves by Clara Brito

15/11/2023 - 26/01/2024

Taipa Village Cultural Association presents its first fashion-themed exhibition, “Tomorrow’s Heritage”, which showcases a distinctive collection of scarves inspired by the creative vision of renowned Portuguese designer and event curator Clara Brito.

Drawing inspiration from tradition and the history of Chinese ceramic art, Clara presents these unique fashion items that embody the art form’s aesthetic patterns and detailing. The exhibition features fashion scarves of different dimensions, all made to the very highest standards. Alongside these smaller creations, several large-scale artistic installations featuring exquisite fabrics are on display to showcase the print aesthetics of these fashion items. The unique collection aims to blend the worlds of industry and art, exploring this eminent fashionista’s professional skills and passion for artistic expression.

**Due to the great public response of “Tomorrow’s Heritage: Fashion Scarves by Clara Brito”, the exhibition will be extended until 26 January 2024 (originally ended on 29 December 2023)

Tomorrow’s Heritage

Co-designed by a community of creative thinkers, researchers, designers and traditional crafts and textile industries, based in the Greater Bay Area and the Portuguese Speaking Countries, TH aims to speculate, research and document, in these different corners of the world, the living cultural beliefs and behavior patterns of its citizens and their secular cultural crafts and textile industry heritage.

Curator’s Statement

Clara Brito is a fashion designer turned entrepreneur and a well-known figure in the local creative sector. Clara’s career has various entrepreneurial facets, such as co-founder of creative agency Lines Lab, +853 Cultural Association, Macau Fashion Link, MunHub, visiting professor at the University of Saint Joseph and member of the Design Trust’s Greater Bay Area Advisory Board. However, this time we have invited Clara to return to her design skills mindset and get involved in the production of a wearable limited edition focused on a very specific fashion item: scarves.

As a designer with a passion for materials and traditional industries, Clara’s artistic process uses traditional materials and crafts, a legacy inherited from her twenty years of living and working in Macau and mainland China. The current work can be seen as an extension of her groundbreaking solo exhibition recently held at the Orient Foundation, entitled ‘She Left Her Body’, in which she invited several local artists (lighting designers, fashion designers, make-up and body painting artists) to collaborate in the production of various pieces for display, resulting in a series of two-dimensional artworks and three-dimensional pieces for installation and performance.

This time it is no different: as part of Tomorrow’s Heritage, a collaborative project between like-minded creatives committed to preserving endangered materials, Clara is working with João Lomelino, a graphic designer with a keen interest in textile design, to print images of broken Chinese ceramic plates—whose production is now discontinued on the local market—onto silk scarves. Interestingly, fashion scarves have an unusual quality; they can be both wearable garments and works of art when framed and hung on the wall. This duality that makes them valuable and even more so because the rarity of the end product is as unique as Made in Macau.

João Ó

Clara Brito

(Macau. Portugal)

Clara Brito, a Macau resident, is a Portuguese designer and event curator living in Macau and Mainland China for over 19 years. She is also the founder of Tomorrow’s Heritage and co-founder of Lines Lab. Dubbed as “must-see” creative agency by the New York Times, it was awarded the “40 under 40” by Perspective Hong Kong in 2008 in the category of Fashion Design, as well as on the global lusophone top 20 ranking by Monocle Magazine.

She is also the co-founder and current president of +853 Cultural Association, a cultural non-profit association created in 2007, and a co-founder of the yearly event This Is My City, a multicultural festival showcasing local and international talents in Macau, China and internationally.

Clara Brito, a woman of many projects, owns Munhub, a local company related to the fashion industry, which has established a network of designers from Asian and Portuguese-speaking countries. And co-founded in 2011, together with architect Carlos Marreiros and Manuel Silva, the initiative Macau Fashion Link which promoted and encouraged the local talents and industry to develop their potential and opportunities throughout the Pearl River Delta and the Portuguese-speaking countries.

Clara Brito holds a Graduate Degree in Equipment Design (Lisbon Faculty of Fine Arts), further studies in Fashion Design at Milan Polytechnic of Architecture and Design, as well as an MBA in Macau’s University of Saint Joseph. She was also a former professor in this university.

Organiser