JEAN-PAUL LESPAGNARD / CHEESE ON FLEEK

Ready to wear collection / Design & production

This collection unfolds as a story of transformation, bridging distant worlds through shifting forms, cultural tension, and unexpected connections.

I created this collection as an exploration of what I call a pop-conceptual language, a space in which references collide, shift, and recompose into something unexpected.

At its core lies a radical cultural contrast I experienced in Mexico. I brought together two communities that, at first glance, seem worlds apart. The Mennonites, with their austere religious lifestyle, their functional garments, traditional checks, floral prints, and structured, buttoned silhouettes. And the Cholombianos, an urban subculture from Monterrey, deeply connected to electro cumbia, known for their extravagant hairstyles and their radically oversized clothing.

What interested me was not just the opposition, but the tension between them. I designed garments that could shift from one identity to the other through snap buttons. In one gesture, a fitted, restrained Mennonite silhouette expands into an exaggerated Cholombiano volume, sometimes reaching XXXL proportions. Even the hairstyles started to echo one another in unexpected ways, creating subtle visual bridges between these two worlds.

The collection also revolves around the idea of “cheese.” Beyond expressions like “on fleek,” cheese became a symbol of mass consumption and immediate pleasure. I was drawn to the visual language of packaging and popular culture, in which everything is graphic, bold, and unapologetically colorful. It became a way to celebrate a certain point of view on taste, something playful, direct, and culturally loaded.

At the same time, I imagined a narrative. A Mennonite girl leaves her rural environment to go into the city and sell the cheese produced by her family, known to be the best in Mexico. She finds herself at busy crossroads filled with cars, and encounters a group of Cholombianos listening to electro cumbia. She falls in love with the leader of the group, and together they decide to form a gang of cheese sellers. This story gave birth to the title of the collection, “cheese on fleek,” something slightly ironic, slightly cool, rooted in both fantasy and everyday life.

The collaboration with Jaguar was not decorative. The presence of the Jaguar XE became an extension of the narrative. It embodied the tuning culture associated with the Cholombianos. I worked on transforming the car using the collection’s main color, an acid green as an evolution of the traditional Jaguar green, turning a classic object into a street culture totem, something re-appropriated, re-coded, and fully integrated into the story.