Rethinking Cancela and Mesejean through fashion media

Blog series Americas and Oceania

Author Daniela Lucena, 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow based at the University of Buenos Aires and the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET)

During my Visiting Fellowship at the British Library, I focused on the work of two key Argentine artists: Delia Cancela and Pablo Mesejean. Emerging in the vibrant cultural scene of Buenos Aires during the 1960s, their collaborative practice offers a unique lens through which to examine the intersections of art, fashion, and design.

Cancela and Mesejean were central figures in the Argentine reception of pop art, a movement that, by the mid-1960s, had expanded internationally and reshaped visual culture through its engagement with mass media, consumer society, and popular imagery. As described in a 1966 issue of the magazine Primera Plana, pop had rapidly spread ‘like a colourful and uncontainable stain’, transforming not only artistic practices but also ways of living and perceiving the world. Within this context, they developed a body of work that blurred the boundaries between artistic disciplines.

During these years, this artistic duo also expanded their practice into theatrical costume design and experimental presentations that brought fashion into the realm of performance. They created costumes for avant-garde theatre productions and participated in innovative events at the Instituto Di Tella, where they staged one of the first fashion shows conceived within an art institution, titled Clothing at Risk. Amid the repressive climate imposed by Onganía’s military dictatorship, they decided to leave Argentina, first travelling to New York and later settling in London.

Building on this framework, my research at the British Library focused on the London years of Cancela and Mesejean (1970-1975), a period that has remained comparatively underexplored in Argentina. Until recently, knowledge of this stage was limited to a small number of images, particularly their celebrated covers for Vogue. The Library’s extensive holdings offered a unique opportunity to expand this corpus. I began by working systematically with issues of Vogue, tracing their collaborations with figures such as Grace Coddington and photographers like Barry Lategan, Norman Parkinson, and Clive Arrowsmith, and then extended the research to other key publications of the period —Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s & Queen, and Nova—where they had also produced editorial work.

What emerged from this material both confirmed and challenged my previous understanding. On the one hand, the magazines document their work alongside leading photographers of the time, situating them within the professional circuits of British fashion. On the other, I was struck by the fact that they also appeared in these publications as figures of interest in their own right, with their distinctive way of dressing becoming part of the visual narrative. Moreover, while I had initially assumed that their production in London centred primarily on hand-painted leather garments, the magazines reveal a much broader and more diverse range of materials, forms, and stylistic approaches.

This expanded corpus not only enriches our knowledge of their work during these years, but also opens up new questions and hypotheses for my research, particularly regarding the relationship between artistic identity, fashion media, and the construction of a public image. Working directly with these primary sources at the Library made it possible to reconstruct this trajectory with greater precision, while also offering a different perspective on their practice. While in Argentina Cancela and Mesejean are primarily recognised as artists, these materials instead foreground their role as designers, revealing a significant dimension of their work that has received comparatively less attention.