CLARA BORDE

If you were born in Portugal in the last thirty years, Cristiano Ronaldo has almost certainly played a role in how you relate to the rest of the world. The cocky young prospect, then the complete player, then depending on who you ask the best in the world, or the best ever. Then the brand. Then something closer to a cyborg, a man who bio-hacked his own body so thoroughly that it allowed him to perform at near-elite level well into his forties. Clara Borde de Castro enters from the margins of that stratified image.

Clara is a Franco-Portuguese artist who makes garments from unofficial Cristiano Ronaldo merchandise and bootleg clothing. Her work departs from copies of copies, and when the source material is already a simulacrum a knock-off of a licensed image of a constructed persona the question of the original stops making sense. What Clara’s archive asks is not what is real but what does real even do for us at this point.

Football has been institutionally captured to the extent that its visual culture is largely corporate property.

The bootleg survives in the margin, that narrow strip of folk production the machine has not monetized yet. It does not fully dissolve when a souvenir becomes a garment. The original
attachment, devotional, obsessive, travels with the object. When Clara cuts a bootleg scarf into a dress, the fandom transforms. What it means to wear Cristiano Ronaldo is a question the official image economy will never be able to ask.

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Edoardo Totaro:

You spent years collecting unofficial Cristiano Ronaldo merch before making anything with it. What were you trying to do and when did the archive become a project?

ClaraBorde de Castro:

My collection began by accident. I was at the beach in Portugal after Euro 2016 and realized I did not have a towel. I found my first beach towel printed with Cristiano Ronaldo’s face on a seaside market.

It was both funny and visually striking, so I bought it. Then, I kept collecting more bootleg objects because I felt they were saying something about our culture. At the time, I was studying graphic design, so I was naturally very drawn to images and visual languages. I’ve always been attracted to aesthetics that people often dismiss as kitsch, vulgar, or outdated. Popular culture and its visual codes were rarely taken seriously in the art and design environments I was in, yet those were precisely the subjects I wanted to explore.

These objects fascinated me because they carried emotion, devotion, and collective memory in a very direct way.

Later, I started reworking the pieces into dresses. I wanted dresses I could wear to the stadium, and they simply did not exist, so I decided to make them myself. It was a way of creating a place for myself within
football culture. The project really became CR7 BOOTLEGACY in 2023–24, when I realized that the collection was speaking about something much larger than Cristiano Ronaldo himself. It was speaking about our relationship to icons, about what it meant for me to grow up Portuguese in France, and about the way many people of my generation experienced Portuguese identity abroad through him. Through the archive, I realized I had unintentionally documented an entire visual history surrounding his career and impact. At that point, the collection stopped feeling like a personal accumulation of objects and started becoming a coherent body of work.

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ET:

Football has undergone a complete institutional capture.

The bootleg exists in the cracks of that system, where folk visual cultures have always lived. Is your practice mainly an aesthetic gesture or something more anti?

CB:

It comes from graphic design and from a broader interest in how images circulate outside official systems. I don’t see my work as a critique of football or its institutions, but rather as a way of working inside its visual residues.

The dresses are like blank sheets of paper onto which I compose images. It just happens that the paper takes the form of a dress adapted to my body.

Because this archive is deeply connected to me, it naturally ends up on my body through
clothing. I have always been frustrated by the immaterial aspect of graphic design, so working with garments allows me to recover something tangible: movement, volume, physical presence. And it’s a shift: allowing these images into another space, where they can exist in a different way and have another
kind of life.

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ET:

There is a point at which Cristiano's self-engineering becomes so total you're no longer dealing with a person but with a proprietary system that also happens to play football.

When did CR7 become something other than Ronaldo? And does the bootleg image capture something the official one has
lost?

CB:

It comes from graphic design and from a broader interest in how images circulate outside official systems. I don’t see my work as a critique of football or its institutions, but rather as a way of working inside its visual residues.

The dresses are like blank sheets of paper onto which I compose images. It just happens that the paper takes the form of a dress adapted to my body.

Because this archive is deeply connected to me, it naturally ends up on my body through
clothing. I have always been frustrated by the immaterial aspect of graphic design, so working with garments allows me to recover something tangible: movement, volume, physical presence. And it’s a shift: allowing these images into another space, where they can exist in a different way and have another
kind of life.

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ET:

For a generation of kids growing up abroad, Ronaldo functioned as a proxy for Portuguese identity. What does he mean to you?

CB:

As I grew up, Ronaldo became more than a player; he became a symbol. At school, while he
was shining at Old Trafford, a classmate once told me: “He’s incredible, and he’s Portuguese, like you.” For the first time, being Portuguese abroad didn’t feel embarrassing. Over the years, he’s also become a figure I relate to, for his mindset of never giving up.

ET:

The bootleg souvenirs you work with were themselves copies of copies.

Does that layering interest you? Are you making work about authenticity, or about what happens when authenticity stops being a meaningful category?

CB:

I like the idea that I’m just another step in that chain. I’m not fixing anything or trying to make the final version of these souvenirs. I’m bringing attention to them, I slightly displace their meaning. Fans who create and wear bootlegs will keep doing it, and probably always in their own way.

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ET:

You take stuff coded as masculine fandom and transform it into garments for feminized
bodies. There is something fetishistic in that transfer, the original attachment does not fully dissolve when the souvenir becomes a dress. Do you think about the tension in that?

CB:

When I make a dress, it’s very important for me to respect the story attached to the images I’m using. It can be linked to a specific club, a national path, or an entire trajectory.

Then, of course, when that image is transferred onto a dress and worn on a female body, something else happens. Movement changes the image. The body distorts it, activates it in a different way. It can become funny, unexpected, it can raise questions.

There is also a performative dimension to it. I know that if I wear one of these dresses in public, it will generate reactions, comments, conversations. So it’s not an everyday garment. It’s more like a piece that exists in a space between clothing and performance. My intention is never to shock or to make fun of these images. When I photograph a piece, I pay a lot of attention to folds, to how the fabric sits, and to any deformation. Yet once it enters public space, I can’t fully predict how it will be read, whether as devotion, irony, or something closer to misunderstanding.

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ET:

Football's official visual economy has historically offered women a very narrow set of positions. The space of fantasy, projection, devotion has been systematically underdeveloped, even as women's football gets institutional traction. Does your work operate in that gap?

CB:

As a woman, I often felt tolerated rather than fully expected in football culture.
My father, a strong football fan, never considered enrolling me in a club, because women’s teams were still very rare in France about twenty years ago. Working with football players' imagery through clothing, and creating fitted dresses that I want to wear myself, is my way of claiming space within this world.



ET:

What does this project become once Cristiano retires and the image finally stabilizes into pure nostalgia? Is there a version of CR7 BOOTLEGACY that exists without him, or does it need him to keep performing?

CB:

We already live in a very nostalgic world when it comes to football. So I believe this work will still resonate after Cristiano Ronaldo’s career, because his impact is not only tied to his performance, but to the cultural moment he represents. We already talk about the Ronaldo-Messi era as something historical.

How will we explain to our kids that there was a time when they were playing at the same time, facing each other at this level? That kind of narrative will stay. But my work is not fixed to him forever. I would like to expand my universe to other popular figures, always connected to identity, roots, and collective memory. My goal is also to encourage people to reflect on
their own icon.

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