In Barcelona, resistance doesn’t always look like a march. Sometimes it looks like a needle cutting through deadstock denim, a pair of hands reshaping discarded fabric, a garment reborn with the quiet rage of someone who has crossed an ocean for the right to simply exist. Sometimes the revolution is stitched together in a garage in Sabadell, or inside an old factory in Sants where a community of migrant street vendors has decided they’re done being invisible.
This winter, TOP MANTA — the fashion brand created by the Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes — drops its first upcycled collection, created in collaboration with experimental designer Tania Marcial. It’s just ten pieces. Ten. Not because exclusivity sells, but because each garment is pulled from the wreckage of a system that tried to grind these people down. Each one is a refusal: small, sharp, and full of life.
The pieces were built slowly, lovingly — hand-intervened between Marcial’s home-garage studio and the Top Manta workshop, where textile training happens next to political organising and shared survival. These aren’t clothes that brag. They brood. They remember. They carry fingerprints, mistakes, recoveries. They are the opposite of fast fashion: they are the time it takes to rebuild a life. The time it takes to heal. The time it takes to say “I’m still here.”
The release comes in three minimal drops — 3 pieces, then 4, then 3 — all launching exclusively on topmanta.store. They’re not fashion moments; they’re offerings. Evidence. Proof of a community that has survived borders, detention centres, police harassment, and laws designed to make them disappear. Proof that they refuse to disappear.
All profits go back to the collective: training, workshops, language classes, legal support, and the ongoing work of helping more manteros leave the street and rebuild their lives with rights, safety, and dignity. The brand is now a cooperative as well as an association. They keep saying it clearly: The system calls us illegal. We don’t have time to wait.
This collection is their answer — punk, handmade, imperfect, necessary.
Ten pieces that say: You tried to erase us. Here we are anyway. And we’re making clothes loud enough to wake the whole city.
Credits:
Photography @danielgarzee
Stylist @browniebrowwn
Stylist assistant: @4lbiita
