Ill Davo
- Milan Tanedjikov
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
A design profile exploring Ill Davo’s emotional storytelling, Asturian heritage, and contemporary tailoring practice within the LIGNES DE FUITE Mentoring Program.
Ill Davo—born Davo Fernandez Suarez—grew up in Candás, a small fishing town in the north of Spain framed by the Cantabrian Sea and the mountains. The place is beautiful, but also heavy: a mix of freedom and safety contrasted with violence, strong personalities, and the feeling that nothing ever changes. This contradiction shaped him early. His world was summers filled with traditional celebrations, Celtic traces woven into the region’s culture, ocean legends, and the omnipresence of soccer. And in the middle of all that, a kid raised by a mother who ran her own hair salon—someone open, stylish, and unafraid to see the world differently. “I think my first relationship with clothing was more like a signal,” he says. “A way to get attention while I tried to figure out who I was.”
Fashion wasn’t the first stop. He started in music—songwriting, performing, writing short scripts for music films. Storytelling came naturally, but eventually the medium felt too small, as if he were always speaking from behind something. In 2021, he left Spain for Vancouver, trying to outrun a stagnancy he felt was swallowing him. He needed distance, and he needed risk. It was in Vancouver, while feeling blocked musically, that he watched a documentary on Lee McQueen. It shifted everything. “I realized fashion could hold the same narrative power—just with more subversion, more control, more world-building.” The clarity was radical. Within weeks he enrolled in the fashion program at John Casablancas Institute in Gastown.
Coming from a working-class background, fashion had always appeared “too glamorous” or inaccessible, until he understood the grit and social weight behind it. His first self-made pieces—a denim skirt and pants he wore on stage—were born from that tension. It was the moment where narrative and material finally met.
Identity, for him, is not a theme but a landscape. He reconnects to Asturias through fashion: Celtic traces, traditional footwear, wool and leather, and the rough silhouettes carved by sea and storms. But he filters all of this through subversion—refusing traditional masculinity, embracing fluidity, breaking inherited rules. He sees tailoring as a form of belonging. Growing up mostly on his own, uniforms fascinated him: clothes that speak for communities. Vulnerability is central to his work. “Fashion helped me stop hiding my vulnerability,” he says. “It became a place where emotion isn’t something to avoid.”
The tension he always returns to—tradition versus rebellion—anchors much of his design vocabulary. He is drawn to characters who feel organic and psychologically complex. Yves Tumor, for example, represents the kind of individual he imagines inhabiting his world: fluid, unsettling, sharp.
Aesthetically, his work is defined by a quiet violence and a soft precision. Shapes inspired by broken glass, cliffs along the Cantabrian coast, rombos, sharp edges, and the mood of psychological thrillers inform the silhouettes. His goal is neither clarity nor comfort, but a feeling of emotional and behavioural truth. He designs in search of belonging within radical individuality.
Fashion school amplified this tension. Tailoring demands structure and discipline, but Davo always felt the push to reject values that didn’t align with him. Many norms in the industry frustrated him—specifically, ideas about bodies, perfectionism, and the belief that results matter more than values. “We’re supposed to shape the future,” he says, “so why are we being fed ideas that already harm the present?” His learning process is both collaborative and deeply introspective. Connecting with others gives him mirrors; solitude gives him clarity.
His methodology begins with a memory—a scenario, a flaw, an emotion. From there he constructs the narrative. He often starts with maximal digital artworks, chaotic tapestries of ideas, and then slowly carves away until meaning appears. He compares it to dissecting a painting by El Bosco, searching for a specific story hidden inside the chaos. Originality, for him, is the meeting point between craft, introspection, and personal perspective.
Storytelling is central, but not literal. He aims for psychological suspense: characters placed in ambiguous worlds, shaped by internal and external pressures. He gravitates toward irony over humor, and toward theatricality born from emotional drama rather than entertainment. Performance becomes a language, not an accessory.
His influences move between sound and image: Frank Ocean’s emotional lyricism, Yves Tumor’s distortion, McQueen’s subversive clarity, Lars von Trier’s Depression Trilogy, and the symbolic language of childhood memories. These coexist with the textures of Asturias—fog, cliffs, cold light, and sea-worn stone.
His current project revisits his teenage years, a period marked by anger, fragmentation, and a lack of belonging. He reinterprets soccerwear—once an emblem of conformity in his hometown—and reshapes it through tailoring. The hybrid reflects a personal evolution: the garment that once hid him becomes a tool for revealing complexity.
As a designer, Davo is someone who searches for belonging across environments. His work stands at the intersection of behavioural study, emotional excavation, and technical craft. “I like when a garment feels both challenging and comforting,” he says. “Like it knows something about you.” His clothes hold layers of introspection—quiet, sharp, and deeply personal.
Looking ahead, he feels himself approaching a redefining stage, open to new disciplines and new internal territories. He wants to unlearn the instinct to over-rationalize creativity, embracing intuition and grounding himself more fully in his roots. He is excited about cultural shifts that might be forming, but also hesitant—aware that transformation is never guaranteed.
What he seeks, ultimately, is to build a world where his heritage, emotions, and imagination coexist with precision and subversion. A place where individuality doesn’t isolate but connects, and where vulnerability becomes a form of strength rather than a danger.
Credits:
Images Davo Fernández Suárez Words Milan Tanedjikov
Davo is currently part of the LIGNES DE FUITE Mentoring Program, where he continues to deepen the emotional, fluid language of ILL DAVO within our studio community. His work will be shown publicly for the first time on December 19th during the Design Research Exhibition at Crossfade — a multidisciplinary evening co-organized with Gabriela Hébert and Narrativ Music. This presentation marks a quiet but resonant milestone in his path, signalling his arrival within Montréal’s emerging designer landscape through introspection, rebellion, and a renewed reading of northern Spanish identity.
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