Last night, Bad Bunny made history at Super Bowl LX. He became the first Latino solo artist to headline the halftime show, performing almost entirely in Spanish, a moment decades in the making. But this wasn't simply representation for representation's sake. He transformed the field into a Puerto Rican casita, shouted out nations across the Americas by name, and closed with a football inscribed "Together, we are America." The statement was unmistakable: authentic identity doesn't seek permission it takes the stage.
The performance channeled the spirit of his Grammy-winning album Debí Tirar Más Fotos a meditation on roots, memory, and resilience. The album weaves Puerto Rican sounds like bomba, plena, and salsa into visuals and lyricism steeped in history and resistance. It explores the melancholy of time's passage and what it means to preserve culture against erasure, inviting listeners to reflect on what we carry with us and what we wish we had captured. The album speaks to the immigrant story the longing for places left behind, family dinners around tables that no longer exist, languages slipping through generations, moments etched in memory rather than pixels. It represents Bad Bunny's determination to keep his feet planted in Puerto Rican soil despite global fame DTMF wraps all of that yearning in rhythm and soul, refusing to let the past fade while building something urgent for the present.
Why This Matters to Me
As a designer, Debí Tirar Más Fotos speaks directly to the work I create. Bad Bunny's album is steeped in nostalgia the plastic chairs that filled every Caribbean household, the seemingly mundane objects that carry entire worlds of memory. For me, it's the pineapple ice bucket, the glass fish ornament perched on a shelf, the patterns that lined my grandparents' home after they arrived in England on the Windrush. These aren't just decorative choices, they're anchors to a place, a time, a version of home that exists more vividly in memory than in any photograph. My collections are built on this same foundation: heritage as both inspiration and resistance, transforming longing into something you can wear.
I weave my family's story into every piece Caribbean landscapes sprawl across prints, motifs from the islands emerge in unexpected places, honouring what my grandparents carried with them and what they built here. Like Bad Bunny bridging bomba and modern production, I'm constantly in conversation between past and present, between the England I grew up in and the Caribbean that shaped my bloodline. Identity isn't static it's layered, complex, sometimes contradictory. My work, like his album, asks: what do we preserve? What do we reimagine? What gets lost if we don't create something that holds it?
Art as Witness
Bad Bunny showed us one answer you put it on the biggest stage in the world, you sing it in your language, and you refuse to shrink. That's the power of art rooted in identity. That's what I strive for in every collection.
