Culture
The paradox of belonging in the United States and how immigrants reshape culture through fashion, art, and daily life. Discover how designers like Mariana Jiménez turn personal heritage into a form of wearable resistance, proving that a country's true vibrancy comes from its unending evolution and the power of a fresh gaze.
Updated 04:15 pm EDT, September 10, 2025
Published 06:42 pm EDT, August 27, 2025
Fashion Designer: Mariana Jiménez
Model: DeAnna May
Modeling Agency: Posche Models
Creative Direction & Set Design: Paloma Racca, Mena Lombard
Make-up Artist: Tatiana Zabora
Photography: Flávio Iryoda
Additional Models: Melisa Harispe, Mathias Magnotta, Paloma Racca, Mariana Jiménez
Special Thanks: Tyler Molinari
Alice the Immigrant
She stepped into a place that felt unfamiliar. The people around her had their own patterns, behaviors, and their own unwritten rules. Nothing made sense right away. Still, she kept walking… curious, hesitant, and full of hope. What she carried with her was what she couldn’t leave behind: memories, moments, and pieces of home. Stories. Symbols. Flowers.
That is how Wonderland began. Because to those already there, it wasn’t wonderful. It was just normal. Predictable. Ordinary. Alice was the one who saw it differently. She saw potential, color, strangeness, beauty. And so, she named it. Wonderland. That word came from her. And that’s the secret. The native sees the soul, but the immigrant sees the wonder.
In many ways, immigration isn’t just movement. It’s a redefinition of space: a new past that creates a different future. That shift in perspective doesn’t erase what was there before, it expands it. And that expansion is what makes cities grow, what gives countries complexity. Each border crossed in pursuit of something better brings more than just a person. It brings flavors and customs, contradictions and traditions, dreams wrapped in different languages. No one arrives with nothing.
That’s how little by little, those pieces begin to settle. They decorate new surroundings. They shift the atmosphere. That’s not intrusion; that’s evolution.
There was no Wonderland until Alice stepped in. Not because she built it and certainly not because she rewrote the rules. She simply saw things differently. That’s the quiet power of the immigrant… They don’t need to rebuild the world, they reveal it.
In the United States we are currently witnessing a loud contradiction. This country, once built in large part by immigrants, is now turning its back on them. History is being rewritten, reframed, and repackaged. Some are told to leave, others are told they’ve always belonged. And the hypocrisy is that both paths were never that different to begin with. Truth be told, unless you are Indigenous, you are not from here. Your ancestors came crossing borders and oceans. Some fleeing war, others chasing gold. Some brought by force and some arriving by choice. But they came. And they brought more than suitcases.
They brought languages, recipes, and beliefs.
And despite everything, those pieces stayed.
To deny immigration, then,
is to deny the roots of this nation.
To hate immigrants is to hate what built your home.
That’s not just cruel. It’s incoherent.
And still, when rejection gets loud, something else rises with it. Resistance. Sometimes it steps into the streets with fists raised and voices chanting. Other times, it moves more quietly. In a painting. In a poem. In that small but defiant choice to stay true to yourself, even when the world insists you forget.
That’s what Mariana Jiménez chose.
She arrived from Bogotá with her past intact, and she made it wearable. Her capsule collection, Transhumants, is a wearable archive of movement and belonging. Rooted in the skyline of Bogotá, embroidered in hundreds of Swarovsky crystals, and unfolding in a new land, this collection speaks of memory. Its silhouettes echo structure. Its textures carry stories. Each look says: “you can wear where you are from”.
This, too, is resistance.
To create. To remember. To wear your roots even when you’re told to take them off. This is how fashion becomes more than fabric and transcends identity. It becomes testimony.
We don’t talk enough about the quiet grief of starting over. After all the noise of politics and protest, what often gets lost is the silence that follows. The quiet ache of absence. Very few people talk about the strength and the fear it takes to cross oceans without knowing when, or if, you will ever come back.
Here’s the truth: it’s not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s subtle. A missing dish from home. A holiday no one here celebrates. A word you can’t quite translate. It’s a long list of little things you never thought mattered, until one day you realize they are what actually held you together. Not just routines or traditions, but anchors.
We tend to see immigration in absolutes: either a crisis or a victory. But in reality, it is much messier. It’s layered. Complicated. It is ambition blended with longing. It is the quiet hope of starting fresh while still grieving what had to be left behind.
And maybe that’s why immigrant voices carry so much weight;
because they live in that space between loss and creation.
They build while holding absence.
They dream while navigating distance.
They adapt while protecting memory.
In that in-between, fashion becomes more than aesthetic. It becomes a container for contradiction. A quiet language that needs no translation. Because a garment can say: here’s where I came from, and here’s where I’m going. In fashion, both truths can live side by side within a single piece.
Places have identities, just like people do. But unlike people, places never stop becoming. The United States of America has never been a single, fixed form. It’s more like a collage: layered, uneven, full of jagged beauty. It was never meant to look polished, on the contrary. Its beauty lies in the unexpected combinations: in the blend of arrivals and memory. In the mix of past and future. All shaped by hope, conflict, and reinvention.
And you can see this, everywhere. In murals, in bakeries tucked into street corners, on subway platforms. You’ll hear it too. Languages mixing, bending, and overlapping. English carrying accents. Spanish spoken with borrowed slang. Every block tells a different story, and every story holds a trace of somewhere else.
Fashion too, reads this landscape. It doesn’t ask for papers but rather welcomes the blend. The more diverse the reference, the more powerful the result. What once belonged to one place gets reimagined in another. A silhouette from Japan meets embroidery from Colombia. A street style from New York merges with tailoring from Milan. And suddenly, a new narrative is born. Not as replacement, but as expansion.
Because the truth is: immigrants don’t just contribute. They reshape. And that reshaping is what keeps culture alive. This is why fear of immigration is not only cruel, but short-sighted. To resist migration is to resist evolution. It is to fight against the very thing that makes this country, and its art, truly vibrant. Immigrants don’t dilute identity. They refine it. They offer contrast. And in contrast, we find dimension.
That’s the paradox and the promise:
that the United States is, at its best, a work in progress.
Always unfinished
and always unfolding.
Always made more beautiful
by the hands of those who choose to call it home.
If the collage offers shape, then naming offers meaning. To name something is to claim it. To define how it will be remembered. That’s why names carry weight, because they are more than titles. They are statements of presence.
Immigrants, too, name things. Sometimes reclaiming starts with a name said properly after years of being mispronounced. Other times it’s taking a word once used to hurt and make it your own. And through the lens of fashion, even a fabric, a cut, or a print can carry a message. For those told to blend in, getting dressed becomes a quiet form of defiance.
That is the deeper magic behind Alice’s naming of Wonderland. It wasn’t just imagination, it was authorship. And immigrants, every day, take part in that act. Not only by arriving, but by telling the world how to see them. How to remember them. And, most importantly, how not to forget.
Alice didn’t arrive with a plan to change anything. She arrived with curiosity, with flowers, with memory. And that was enough. Through her eyes, the strange became beautiful. The rigid became possible. The ordinary became enchanted.
Maybe that’s the real power of the immigrant: not in just what they bring in their hands, but in what they carry in their gaze. They don’t just cross borders, they expand them. They don’t just build homes, they redefine what home can mean. Alice didn’t rename a kingdom. She renamed a feeling. She called it Wonderland not because it was perfect, but because she chose to see the wonder.
And we would do well to remember that.
Because today, in a time when walls are built and fear is weaponized, the act of welcoming is more than moral or defiant. It is magical. To open a door is to invite transformation. To listen is to be changed. The moment we stop seeing immigrants as outsiders, and begin seeing them as storytellers, as architects of wonder, is the moment we understand what real progress looks like.
In the end, this and any land becomes Wonderland the moment someone new looks at it with fresh eyes.
Because Wonderland isn’t a place. It’s a perspective.
Fashion Designer and Professor, Mena believes that fashion completely transcends the surface and the most important is how one feels rather than anything else. Fashion is really about how empowered one becomes by it. She channels vibrant flares of vintage fashion and dreams of contemporary twists, inspired by her own life and travels.
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