Alta Costura & Sara Barja
Every single UTKU piece, if you trace it back far enough, comes down to one woman: Orlanda Eufemia Cosios Vázquez.
From Small-Town Queen To Apprentice
Orlanda grew up in Vilcabamba, in the south of Ecuador. As a girl she was actually crowned queen of the town, which has nothing to do with sewing but is too good a detail to leave out. Later, as a young woman, she trained under Sara Barja, an alta costura designer in Loja who made pageant gowns for the queens of Quito. That apprenticeship taught her how to construct a garment properly, the couture way, long before she ever had a business of her own.
She started small. Sewing for her own parents, then her siblings.
From Apprentice To Three Factories
From there she opened her first factory, in 1975. Then a second. Then a third, eventually running all three in Ibarra under her own company, Modas La Lojanita.
And it didn't stop with her. Her son, who runs the factory's operations today, grew up in it. His wife joined the family by marriage and worked her way up from the seamstresses' floor before training formally as a pattern designer — she's the head designer now. Their daughter, UTKU's founder, grew up hanging around the factory without really realizing she was learning anything: how to judge a fabric, how a garment actually goes together. Third generation of designers in this family, whether she planned on it or not.
It's Not About The Address.
Hours matter more than the postal code. Sara Barja taught a young woman in Loja that lesson, one gown at a time, sometime in the middle of the last century. That's the actual origin of every UTKU piece. Not a factory, not a five-year plan. Just one teacher and one very patient student.
So yeah, we'll say it without flinching: UTKU is alta costura. Nothing about it looks like Paris, and by Sara Barja's math, that was never really the point.
— The UTKU TeamKeep reading: La Escuela, The Workshop Floor, how that training still gets passed on today · The Fabián Shirt, a piece that grew out of this same training · back to Heritage
