Hermès unveiled its latest artist commission last week, inviting Jose Campos, better known as Studio Lenca, to transform the London flagship windows, right on time for Fashion Week. The result is an explosion of colour and celebration: a cut-out characters caught mid-motion. Playful, defiant, and joyous, it’s a burst of life in the heart of Mayfair.

Studio Lenca is a working name: “Studio” as a space for experimentation and“Lenca” honouring the Indigenous ancestry of his family from El Salvador.

Born in La Paz during the country’s brutal civil war of the late 1980s, Campos fled with his mother, travelling by land to the US, where he grew up under the label of “illegal alien” in the gaze of a conservative administration. Today, Studio Lenca’s practice is rooted in knowledge, and visibility and his work spans performance, video, painting, and sculpture.

His process begins with personal memory, but is underpinned by social activism. The work navigates borders and identities erased through colonisation and conflict. In vivid portraits, the artist and his community emerge proudly and certainly on the new Hermès store.

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Images: copyright Hermès.