Zara's curious tribute to the gypsy ethnic group

Zara has done it again. Without any shame or embarrassment, it has strolled through the supermarket of social struggles, underground cultures, and symbolic identities with its cart wide open: a bit of marginality to give it pedigree, some uncomfortable figure of those who were a nuisance in life, and, above all, a good dose of rebellion. That's right: all nicely domesticated. Everything, passed through the quick boil of fast fashion, shrink-wrapped and ready to be consumed in the form of a prefabricated identity. And this time, who got to enter the shredder of turbocapitalism? Camarón de la Isla.And this in the full Camarón year, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the birth of the iconic cantaor, a figure who was not only an exceptional voice of flamenco, but also one of its great renovators. From La leyenda del tiempo, he opened the genre to new sounds and sensibilities, and moved it from an almost fossilized space to a living territory in tension with the present. But, furthermore, he contributed to overflowing the social image of gypsy culture beyond the cliché to which it had been subjected during Francoism, trapped between folklorism and marginality. Together with key figures like Paco de Lucía, he broadened the imaginaries around gypsy identity, both from within and in its public projection.

And in view of this, Pull&Bear, a brand of the Inditex group, has considered it entirely appropriate to pay tribute to him with a capsule collection. But what could be the fairest and most proportionate tribute to a figure of this stature? Well, very easy: a couple of t-shirts with his face, another with a fragment of La leyenda del tiempo and various allusions to the San Fernando neighborhood. There are also no missing hands clapping or the essential cliché of the bull. Special mention deserves the mini shorts –the kind that leave a third of your buttock exposed– with the word “Camarón” stamped from one end of the ass to the other. All in all, arranged among raglan sleeve t-shirts, bell-bottom jeans and leather jackets, in an aesthetic that oscillates between forced nostalgia and a kind of postcard-style delinquency, closer to the aesthetic of films like El pico or La estanquera de Vallecas by Eloy de la Iglesia than to any lived reality.

But the successful tribute does not end here. The collection is accompanied by a promotional video in which singer Amaia Romero performs Volando voyBut the successful tribute doesn't end here. The collection is accompanied by a promotional video in which the singer Amaia Romero performs We hope this collection sells what it has to sell, but that it passes quickly through our retina without settling in and saves us, poor Camarón de la Isla, from ending up integrated into the repertoire of pitifully printed faces that populate so many t-shirts around the world: that of Che Guevara photographed by Alberto Korda, that of Bob Marley or that of Frida Kahlo. Figures who in their time embodied ideals, starred in struggles or shook entire cultures, but who today, like the faces sculpted at Mount Rushmore, have been petrified into a consumerist emptiness as massive as it is uncritical. A community like the gypsy one, historically stigmatized and condemned to the periphery, did not need this tribute. And if Inditex really wanted to claim Camarón, perhaps it should have started with something much less flashy and much more uncomfortable: understanding what it meant to sing the way he sang.