ABOUT XKALINA

Founded in Mexico in 2019, XKALINA creates leather garments and accessories that blur the lines between art, fashion, and design. Every piece is realized entirely by hand and arises from a deep and intimate conversation with nature, natural materials, and craft.

We honor leather as the most primal of all textiles, the "noble savage" of the natural fibers. Our approach is derived from a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic crafting techniques, which is the lineage we lean upon to cultivate our unconventional take on contemporary leatherwork.

THE ARTIST

Born and raised in Bulgaria, Kalina graduated with a degree in Industrial Design from the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. Over her 20 year career, she has worked interdisciplinary in close collaboration with a prestigious lists of artists in music, fashion, performance, film and photography from around the world.
While living in Berlin, Kalina cultivated a personal fascination with leather, upcycling vintage leather garments she found in European flea markets into ornate costumes and accessories. Through her personal practice, the artist developed an intimate familiarity with leather as a textile with many different faces and personalities, and created her own techniques for cutting, knotting and dyeing the natural material.
In 2016 she was invited to collaborate with a fashion house in Mexico to teach her leatherwork techniques to local Mayan artisans. Kalina quickly became enamored of the patience, devotion and skill her Mayan collaborators brought to the craft and decided to employ a small in-house team to launch XKALINA and bring the "Made by hand in Mexico" concept to a wider global audience.

THE CRAFT

Our unique leather cutting, knotting and finishing techniques require years of devoted practice wherein the artisan is focused on mastering one delicate gesture at a time.
We cut each skin by hand into narrow strips in a circular manner that allows for virtually zero material waste. When hand knotting, our artisans lend their individual touch, giving each design a unique variability. This allowance for perfect imperfection is an innate aspect of our artisanal production methods and our artistic sensibility.

THE ARTISANS

We work with a small team of highly skilled master artisans who each begin as apprentices to develop their skills in cutting, knotting, and finishing over time. The techniques we use require years of training each to arrive at the level of quality desired.

Because of this, XKALINA creates a bond with its artisans long-term, creating a well-rounded collective of skilled craftspeople who grew together and help train new team members as we expand.

THE MATERIALS

We work with deadstock and leftovers from the high fashion industry. Primary full-grain horse hide, sheepskin, and goat suede because they are naturally soft to the touch, light, and durable. Our suppliers are small and mid-sized family businesses based in Mexico, who work closely with us to find and select the precise quality that our techniques require. Kalina is always on the hunt for rare and unique materials to add to her collection of treasures for creating one-of-a-kind bespoke designs. Every design's final shape comes to life in harmony with its soft organic and structural elements. Every single piece we create is unique and could never be reproduced in exactly the same way.

READ OUR MANIFESTO