COMPENDIUM
NO MÁS:
Layering Time, Textiles & Testimony
History, like fashion, is layered.
Created by interdisciplinary artist and fashion designer Noemí Méndez-Colón, No Más: Layering Time, Textiles & Testimony is a body of work that merges fashion design and studio arts to produce four ensembles covering ready-to-wear, couture, avant-garde and slow fashion. Each look in No Más represents a uniform — not just of style, but mentality — designed to be layered as homage to the structured ensembles of the Victorian era, with each tier functional and fashionable, unfurling like a nesting doll to reveal the depths of histories in every seam. This project explores a network of fabric manipulation, manufacturing technology and critical design through a conceptual fashion collection to examine the intimate relationship between fashion and resistance through the “uniform effect” as seen throughout Chicana history. Functioning as a practical archive to unveil an artistic declaration, the polysemous term “no más” loosely translates to “no more,” “enough,” or “just because” to symbolize the multidimensional struggles for freedom, justice, and self-expression.
No Más is more than a fashion collection, it’s a record of our rejections to oppression, a declaration of resilience, and a powerful testament of resistance — revealing how clothing has long operated as a tool of both oppression and expression.
CONTINUE
No Más: Layering Time, Textiles & Testimony implements an interdisciplinary network of manual, digital, technical, and conceptual skills. With each look, No Más reclaims narratives by integrating academic and applied research with innovative and industry-standard design practices. This project applied a wide set of diverse techniques, including naturally dyed textiles, acrylic painting, linoblock printing, patternmaking and draping. The collection further exhibits proficiency in manual and digital product development through textile manipulation, convertible silhouettes, 3D-printed features with sustainable fabrication methods, as well as technical competency in Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop alongside experimentation in Midjourney, TukaTech, and CLO3D. By blending ancestral arts with contemporary crafts, this work reflects the ability to translate cultural storytelling into tangible form, emphasizing fashion’s responsibility to protect, evoke, and empower.
Presented as part of Méndez-Colón’s capstone thesis, No Más invites viewers to reconsider the role of fashion beyond aesthetics: as an embodied form of protest, a record of survival and a vessel for collective memory. In the words of the artist, “Fashion is a way of declaring: ¡NO MÁS!”
fashion Design
portfolio
editorials
BARE ROOTS
LINGERIE
INTER/EX:CHANGE
LOUNGEWEAR
(r)Evolución
STREETWEAR
ZOOT SCOUTS OF AMERICAS
EVENING WEAR
ARTS
communications
exhibitions
self-publications
PERFORMANCE
arts & activism panelist
latin american studies' 65th anniversary conference
Slide deck for the capstone thesis presented at California State University, Los Angeles’ research conference celebrating 65 years of teaching, scholarship, and activism to reflect on the program’s legacy and exploration of the ongoing struggles for justice across the Américas.
no más, ya voy
get (un)ready with me
A visual narrative on the (un)layering process of (un)becoming; inspired by social/media trends, compulsions and overconsumption that ensues from the path for yourself in peace.