September 9, 2024 |
I first met Miguel Adrover in September 2021, encouraged by my friend Alexandra Carl, a consultant and stylist who was then editing Collecting Fashion: Nostalgia, Passion, Obsession, which was finally released this spring by Rizzoli.
The book concerns the complex psychology of collecting fashion and its creative and personal implications. Alex got word that Adrover had moved back to his native Mallorca, where he had a warehouse stuffed to the brim with the entire archive of his groundbreaking work, and felt I was the one who would be able to connect with him. We discussed whether such a treasure trove of pieces could be considered a collection and, in the end, agreed that Adrover was a unique kind of collector: he kept his own works in order to preserve his legacy. In hindsight, framing him as such perfectly fitted with the singular individual I had the privilege to meet, though not without a little hesitation on my side. Looking at his Instagram, where he has a new embodiment as a photographer, what struck me in the theatrical self-portraits he takes in crazy disguises was a certain ego-tripping manic quality that made me worry he was one of those ego-monsters who would be impossible to connect with during an interview. But Alex insisted and convinced me to take the flight and give the conversation a go. I am thankful she did. The encounter was brief, just a smattering of hours, but the connection was intense. What follows is a new take on the story written for the book. In my writing, I often reuse and shift what I have already written – new contexts create new meanings, which somehow fits in with the way Adrover retells his own story in clothing and enjoys the rural daily life he now leads.
Who is Miguel Adrover?
Traces of Adrover’s work are everywhere of late and not just because upcycling and repurposing have become common currency. The crafty rebelliousness and multicultural spin of cult labels such as Vaquera and GmbH owe a lot to Adrover. And yet, it’s mostly the nerds and aficionados who remember who he is and what he did. Thereafter, before delving into the emotional matter of our encounter, it can be helpful to recall his brightly burning, if brief, fashion career. Born in 1965 in Mallorca, he is completely self-taught – he dropped out of school aged 12 to help on his family farm – and grew up creatively not in Spain but in London, in its gritty yet infinitely lively early-to-mid-Eighties heyday. Leigh Bowery, Bodymap and Michael Clark were all part of the creative circles he delved into. The strongest personal bond, however, was the one he forged with Alexander McQueen, whom he befriended and creatively helped on shows and pieces. In 1995, Adrover moved to New York, where he opened the cutting-edge boutique Horn and launched his eponymous line four years later, immediately becoming a darling of the press. Only a year later, he received the inaugural Perry Ellis Award for Best New Designer of the Year. The exposure attracted the interest of investment company Pegasus, which lavishly backed the label in the hope of making it a big hit. The path was brilliant, but the deal did not last long: the aftermath of 9/11 had a deep impact (which we’ll come to). He showed until 2005 but by then had become a pariah; he disappeared, not coming back until 2012 with a completely repurposed collection. After that, he moved back home to Mallorca and quit fashion to focus on art and photography. Which finally brings me to our encounter.
Mallorca
Carrer Talaiassa is in the south-east of the island. Fields the colour of terracotta are all around. The sea is two miles away. This is Spain, still, but one begins to smell Africa in the dryness of the landscapes, in the chalky aridity of the colours. From here, Algeria can be reached by a small fishing boat in a little over a day. I reach a small, sand-coloured house ensconced in greenery with a battered Jaguar car parked out front. It used to be his grandma’s house, but now Miguel Adrover lives here. He is tall, lanky: a slightly menacing Giacometti sculpture of a man with the reassuring hippie looks of Jesus Christ, his long hair held in a braid, an unkempt beard. His eyes are big, watery and melancholic. When he smiles, his whole face lights up with enthusiasm and, dare I say it, ingenuity. It is with a bright smile that Adrover welcomes me on a balmy Sunday morning. “You’re early,” he says. I am. We enter the small living room, which is furnished with two thorn leather couches cornering a wooden table. Grandma’s portrait is framed and hangs on the side of the door, as if she were still guarding the house. It is an image that oozes serenity and wisdom: she smiles sweetly, white hair framing a beautiful face. An arched door leads to the kitchen. Adrover gives me a glass of water, pouring it from a big bottle. Another glass suddenly falls on the floor, shattering into pieces. “This is a good sign,” he says. “We broke the ice.”
The ice is broken indeed. He is warm and direct, visceral and unfiltered: a far cry from the stereotyped fashion personalities who invariably act as avatars, instructed by publicists to better sell themselves. He tells things as they are, brutally. He may not be the best at selling himself and this might be why, despite his immense talent and striking sense of elegance, not to mention the sensibility with which he pre-empted relevant topics such as multiculturalism, repurposing and environmental responsibility, he didn’t reach the top of the fashion game. That is where he ought to be, but he remains completely out of it. “Today, I consider myself a photographer. Fashion was just a phase of my creative evolution. The aesthetic is the same and it comes from my guts. What is different is just the form it takes.”
Be it fashion design or image-making, what is striking about Adrover is his love for clothing, as objects hold a narrative power but also have a life of their own. Clothes, for him, are an infinitely malleable medium. He is attracted not by brand new stuff, but by things that have already been owned and lived in, with the traces of wear and tear written all over them. “When my grandmother passed away, the only thing that I asked was to see her closet, and that of my grandfather. And that is what I kept for myself,” he says. This clothing, along with all the pieces he designed over the years for his own label, converge and clash into a crammed archive. Adrover knows the value of things and never throws anything away: not his designs, nor the clothing he came across and inherited. His collection of items, however, is not exactly an archive. It is, rather, a wardrobe, a place where he chooses items for whatever purpose they may serve, whether that’s dressing for everyday life or devising looks for himself or the mannequins that populate his photographs.
“There is a lot of women’s stuff in my archive and all of the Miguel Adrover pieces are sample size. This is why I try to stay thin. I want to fit [into the clothes], as certainly I am not interested in buying something new!” he says with a laugh. Suddenly, his Giacometti-inspired physicality is explained. The man’s looks are indeed striking. He later tells me that he is of both Jewish and Arab descent, a mix that probably explains the singularity of his appearance.
New stuff has probably never interested Adrover. Right from the start, repurposing was one of his main outlets of fashionable expression. His breakthrough pieces were a battered I ♥ NY T-shirt completed with ruffled sleeves, a whole crocodile skin turned into a skirt, a Burberry trench coat worn inside out and back to front, and a dirty mattress belonging to Quentin Crisp he found on the street and turned into a dress. This was more than 20 years ago, when upcycling was not even a concept and only Martin Margiela was deconstructing charity shop finds into contemporary couture. Adrover went even further: he appropriated cultural symbols and made them part of his highly political, intensely emotional language. He morphed New York Yankees caps into shoulder pads and attached a stained Coca-Cola T-shirt to an East African galabeya (a loose-fitting unisex robe). “Back then, big corporations sued you for appropriating their logos or pieces, now everybody is interested in collaborations,” he says. Adrover is well aware of the fact that many of fashion’s current hot topics, from diversity to environmental responsibility to circularity, have been part of his work since day one, and that many of fashion’s superstars owe him a lot, but he does not seem to be bothered by it. He has always felt like the underdog and has made sure to champion others. With the slightly harsh earned wisdom of someone who is also completely happy with the rural, solitary life he lives today, he says, “The real revolutions start in small places and in small circles, and then spread and spread. Designers today might pillage from my work without acknowledging my name, but I know that the seeds or the bacteria of my thinking have infected the system, which is enough for me.” That infection is widespread, but there is a fundamental difference that he is quick to point out. He’s sensitive to the fact that today’s cultural climate is being poisoned by marketing on one side and the discomforting narrow-mindedness of cancel culture on the other. “We were a lot freer back then. We could do whatever we wanted and we did it for ourselves, not to sell more.”
That “back then” refers to a span of 20 years, at the beginning of which sits the 9/11 watershed. The shockwave that followed has been a long one and Adrover was deeply affected by it. “I went from living the American dream in New York, going from the basement in which I used to work to the Bowery penthouse where I used to live when Pegasus backed my label to being completely out of everything and moving back to Mallorca and rural life.” He was labelled a one-time messiah, part-time pariah of New York’s fashion scene. He quickly went downhill from being the darling of the press and the buyers to being accused of collaborating with the enemy. In February and, crucially, on September 9, 2001, he showed two Middle East-inspired collections that, with their elongated lines, vibrant sombreness and sense of cultural wandering, today look like the peak of his work, but at the time caused debate around sensitive references. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The freedom he had always pursued crashed brutally into the rigidities and moralism of a shocked and newly ‘patriotic’ American culture, and that pretty much marked the end of his career. The collection was never made and his business shut down after Pegasus bailed. In 2002, he told The Washington Post wryly, “After 9/11, I was feeling like I was not wanted here. We got criticised so much. [People said] the only buyer we’d have is bin Laden.”
He continued to show in New York, presenting one men’s/women’s collection per year, again anticipating the current trend for mixed gender and mixed seasons, but his fame faded away. The fashion system can be ruthless and Adrover had to face a lack of humanity and recognition. The final turning point was the Out of my Mind collection he presented in 2012, which was entirely made by repurposing stuff that belonged to him, his family and friends. In Adrover’s deft hands, shirts, bed linens, T-shirts and burqas got scissored and sculpted into something completely alien, with volumes twisting and coiling around the body. In fostering an idea of circularity, he was ahead of his time, and yet once again not everybody got it. Today, the same transformative energy can be found in his pictures: narrative scenes inhabited by mannequins and marked by an intense layering of iconographies, textures and colours. Adrover’s art is wild as it is poetic, just like his fashion.
What strikes me about the ambiances that Miguel Adrover inhabits is the intense autobiographical aura they exude: the same messiness, layering and wandering of his work and persona, which I came into contact with in the few hours we spent together. I am struck by both his vulnerability and strength, and by the sense of a human who is close to being out of his mind, in the best possible way. When he tells me that living alone has made him create three or four characters for himself that he impersonates, he asks me, “Am I loco?” Not at all: in Miguel’s world, everything makes sense. There is a narrative and an emotional urge in what he does that borders on the feverish, which probably explains the profound link, both human and professional, he had with McQueen. “I remember Lee was with me, having lunch on the sofa, when he got the Givenchy call [in 1996].” The two collaborated on showpieces and nurtured a friendship that lasted. One feels a similar creative urge in both, a will to be as creatively raw as possible: the exact opposite of what fashion is about right now – hype, money, influencing, a general lack of radicalism. Adrover is a radical and that is what makes him more relevant now than he ever was. And his disdain for money and hype over creativity and expression truly matters, which explains why he has been rediscovered after years of oblivion. The last image I have of Miguel Adrover is him tapping on the window of my taxi and waving goodbye with a bright smile. The more I think about it, the more the harsh serenity of his rural seclusion looks like a meaningful and brutally dreamy escape from the meaninglessness of the now.
Taken from Issue 73 of 10 Magazine – RISING, RENEW, RENAISSANCE – is on newsstands September 18. Pre-order your copy here.
MIGUEL ANDROVER: CHARACTER ACTOR
Photographer and Talent MIGUEL ADROVER
Text ANGELO FLACCAVENTO
