Candy Necklace
Casted sugar, wire. 7×10″
Made from sugar-cast beads and wire, Candy Necklace deepens Corchado’s exploration of sugar as both material and metaphor within her fashion practice. The diversely shaped beads – some faceted, others spherical, square, or diamond – are strung in a deliberate pattern along a long strand that culminates in a star-shaped pendant. Pieces of azabache (jet), traditionally worn in Puerto Rico as protection against the evil eye, are seamlessly woven into the necklace. The beads shift in hue from warm golden amber to deep, dark amber, nearly indistinguishable from the jet itself, catching the light in ways that evoke both ornament and relic. Candy Necklace not only challenges the political system that fashion was built under, but resituates our relationship with natural materials in clothing. Using sugar, a quickly decomposing material, Corchado reframes the modern idea of clothing permanence.
Mel Corchado is a Brooklyn-based Boricua fashion designer and artist whose work reimagines fashion as a tool for decolonization and collective care. Through upcycling, biomaterial innovation, and community-led programs such as clothing swaps and mending workshops, she builds alternatives to the fashion industrial complex that center skill-sharing, relationship-building, and sustainability. She debuted her thesis collection, Everything for Everybody, at the Brooklyn Museum during NYFW SS24. Corchado is a Global Fashion Agenda Next Gen Assembly Member (’25), a Parsons MFA Fashion Design and Society alumna (’23), a Teen Vogue Generation Next designer (’23), and a CFDA Scholar (’22).
“I’ve never observed my sugar work in a natural setting! I can’t wait to see how it responds to the elements.”
IG: @melcorchado
Woven riot 