THE MAN WHO SENT A PAPAYA TO THE MOON

Every designer on the bill at the Leman Ballroom is there because Alejandro Glatt asked them. He is also, on September 10, walking his own collection, which is either a conflict of interest or the only honest way to produce a show about visibility. Glatt is a third generation Ashkenazi Jewish Mexican artist, born into Mexico City's Jewish community, trained not in art but in business creation and development at ITESM Santa Fe, with an exchange semester in Melbourne. That detail matters more than it should. The reason his work travels is that he has always understood distribution as part of the medium. He founded Feel the Fruit in 2019, a practice built around fruit as a universal language, with the papaya as its central symbol of union, heritage and reconnection, staged as immersive installations designed to engage all five senses. He built twelve NFT collections, co founded Tulum Crypto Fest, and served as a digital curator for Polygon Studios. In 2024 his work traveled on the Lunaprise lunar museum mission, making him the first Mexican artist to put a papaya on the Moon, and the first Mexican Jewish artist with work on the lunar surface. He has shown at the Louvre, at Art Basel Miami, at SXSW, at Van Der Plas Gallery in New York, in Tel Aviv, Tulum, Mykonos, Ibiza and Costa Rica. He has collaborated with Forever 21, Guess, Lamborghini and Dr. Simi. He holds the GBA Arts Award and the Sustainable Digital Art Award. Twenty one thousand five hundred people follow the work daily. Then October 7 happened, and he was in the country. He had opened an exhibition in Israel on the sixth. What came out of it was GLATT KOSHER POP ART, a lifelong joke about his surname turned into a working movement. The objects are the most joyful things in the room: mezuzahs and challah covers built in pop collage, disco mirror, crystal facets and hand beaded Wixarika, the Huichol craft of western Mexico. Furry mezuzahs. Disco ball mezuzahs. A Mensch challah cover. Handmade in Mexico, signed and numbered, shipped with authenticity cards. He sold out at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair, twenty two pieces in four days, and has a Jerusalem Biennale showing ahead of him. His articulation of why is the clearest sentence anybody involved with this show has produced. "Jewish art is not only about religion or history," he writes. "It is about survival. Pride. Emotion. Community. Memory." His answer to a world telling Jews to be quieter was to make Jewish art louder, bigger and more public. The runway label pairs that practice with SPENGLISH, the bilingual streetwear brand founded by Simon Guindi Cohen in 2006, whose entire premise is stated in its name. "Spanish plus English equals SPENGLISH," Guindi told Elite Daily. "The union of two amazing forces results in the creation of a unique identity." The brand began after Hurricane Katrina, when Guindi printed Do Your Part tee shirts and raised forty thousand dollars at a campus fundraiser, whic