Agua by Agua Bendita

Agua by Agua Bendita

Agua Bendita began in 2003 when Catalina Álvarez and Mariana Hinestroza, then fashion students in Medellín, started making swimsuits out of factory scraps on Álvarez's grandmother's sewing machine. In 2018 they launched Agua by Agua Bendita, the ready-to-wear line built around hand embroidery and crochet.

Dresses

The dresses are where the embroidery gets room to work. Álvarez and Hinestroza met as design students in Medellín and started the original brand in 2003 with almost nothing, stitching swimsuits from scraps collected off local factory floors. The patchwork instinct never really left the house.

Tops and shirting

Every piece is hand-worked by a network of roughly seven hundred women across small workshops in Antioquia, known internally as the AB Hearts. Many were previously unemployed or working from home around caregiving, and the needlework techniques come down through their own families. This is the brand's actual production line, not a side programme.

Swim

Swimwear is the origin category and still the strongest. The label showed at Miami swim week for the first time in 2006 and by 2007 was one of the first Colombian fashion companies exporting seriously. Early suits came with a scapular, the traditional Colombian good-luck amulet, attached.

Skirts

Kendall Jenner shot the swim campaign in 2013 and was announced as the face of the 2014 collection that October, with Bar Refaeli, Irina Shayk, Izabel Goulart and Candice Swanepoel cycling through around the same period. That run of campaigns is what took the brand from regional to international. The aesthetic did not change to accommodate it.

Trousers and shorts

The 2018 launch of Agua by Agua Bendita moved the same craft into full resort ready-to-wear, developed alongside Sí Collective. It is the line where the crochet and the embroidery are the garment rather than the trim. The parent brand now reaches more than fifty countries with around thirty stores in Colombia.

More from the collection

In September 2026 the label staged a Madrid presentation built around Medellín florals and crochet, which is a neat summary of where it sits now: Colombian technique, European audience. No LVMH Prize, no CFDA, no ANDAM. It grew through swim week and word of mouth instead.

Our honest take

Buy the embroidery, which is the whole proposition, and buy it in swim or dresses where there is enough surface to show it off. The hand-work is genuinely labour-intensive and the workshop structure behind it is documented. Print-shy shoppers should keep walking.