“Now You Can Feel Good About Fashion”

"Now you can feel good about fashion and proudly wear a work of art," says María Chevez, architecture, educator, art curator, designer, and founder of Baghaus.

Handmade, upcycling, sustainable, circular economy, zero waste, less packaging, are key factors. She created her own company for the sustainable design of accessories, under the concept of upcycling. "Taken advantage of waste materials to manufacture new products of higher quality and economic value," she explains.

It was born in 2015 when María Chevez received fabric trimmings and leather scraps from a sophisticated interior design company in Houston, Texas. María immediately saw the possibilities for upcycling and reducing landfill waste. 

She transformed formerly discarded materials into attractive and functional designs. Each casual bag and stylish clutch, with its unique textures, and colors shows the rigors’ attention to detail María pours into all her creations. 

Since her childhood, she has been immersed in a cultural and intellectual environment. Architect graduated from the National University of La Plata, she lives in Houston, Texas, many years ago. She has been a collaborator, consultant, produce, and director of more than forty art exhibitions in the United States in six years. At 52, she defines herself as "an art lover."

Differences Between Upcycling and Recycling

When we talk about recycling, we refer to an industrial process through which waste is transformed into new material and is used for the production of new objects. Upcycling is a recently coined term, also known as creative recycling. In Upcycling, objects are used to create products through creativity that have a greater value than the original object had. It is about transforming waste into valuables using the imagination.

One of the great challenges of upcycling is to provide great value to forgotten objects or objects with a useful life about to expire, but this does not mean that they are not valuable products: You can upcycling with exclusive materials and very expensive products. Upcycling means giving a twist, thinking about another use. 

Also read: LET'S HELP PRESERVE OUR PLANET ON THE 2021 WORLD CLEANUP DAY

María as an Art Curator

Founder and artistic director of Art Box Gallery, she will inaugurate her next Argentine Soul exhibition at the Consulado General y Centro de Promoción of Argentina in New York City. 

The Promoter of Argentine Culture

Her passion for art led her to represent numerous artists who committed to promoting Argentine talents abroad in a professional relationship of dedication and trust.

"Argentine Soul is more than a title. It is a brand that represents us through a sequence of pauses, colors, contrasts, and perspectives, and they are achieved from intangible values such as time and soul," explains María.

The material selected for the show has outstanding artistic and aesthetic qualities.

"Each one of the Sergio LLamera photographs refers us to a contemporary moment of our land, starring people with first and last names that merge in an undivided context," she summarizes, revealing that behind each image there is a life story that proudly harbors a geographic diversity, climatic and productive.