A hand-crafted puppet conceived and built to walk the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid. Designed in collaboration with Yelisabet Anastasia Santibañez and Azar Yazbek, the figure is a portrait of Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, built entirely by hand, carried by a model, and dressed by the designer's own atelier.
The process began with the face. Yelisabet Anastasia Santibañez sculpted the head in clay, capturing the likeness with precision before casting it into a mould. From that mould, the final head emerged, a surface ready to be brought to life. That task fell to Vertha Alvarez, who painted, made up and styled the figure: skin tones layered carefully, eyes defined, hair set into the auburn curls that have become part of Agatha's recognisable image. The body followed a different logic, structural before it was tactile. An internal wooden armature was constructed to give the puppet its proportions and posture. Over that skeleton, foam was shaped and a skin-finish textile was hand-sewn by Azar Yazbek and Vertha Alvarez, building the figure layer by layer until it held its own form. Articulated joints were integrated at key points, allowing the puppet's arms and legs to move with intention as it travelled down the runway in the arms of the model.
The dress was produced by Agatha's atelier. The shoes, an interpretation of her signature aesthetic in miniature, were designed and 3D printed by Vertha Alvarez and Beta, translating the designer's visual language into a scale that had never needed to exist before. The result is somewhere between craft object and character: a miniature of the designer herself, precise enough to be recognised, alive enough to walk.
