Fashion is relentless, and it is fickle. But few designers have experienced its frailties like Miguel Adrover. He entered fashion in the 90s amidst the peak of the “anti-fashion” movement, when the likes of Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo and the Antwerp Six had shifted the lens of luxury fashion from the antiquated ritz of legacy brands to a sharpened modernity that deconstructed the normative language of fashion design. Following this pivotal creative renewal, much of the fresh talent was swiftly bought out by massive retail conglomerates, namely LVMH and Kering. At the turn of the century, the focus shifted to unfettered commercialism, and independent designers were left to fend for themselves. As the fashion industry endured an identity crisis, Miguel Adrover cut through the confusion and chaos with sincerity and integrity.
Born in 1965, Miguel Adrover grew up in the village of Calogne, a quaint seaside town of little more than 1000 people on the island of Majorca, Spain. He dropped out of school when he was 12 to work on the family farm enveloped by towering almond trees and livestock. After he served his mandatory military service from ages 17 to 19, he made frequent trips to London, where he saw the birth of the punk and New Romantics movement. The vivid expressionism that bands like Bauhaus and The Cult gave through their moody music and sensual style inspired the Spaniard. Invigorated by the fresh urban energy that diverged from his humble roots, Adrover made up his mind to go to New York City. When Adrover arrived in New York in 1991, the city was in bad shape. Following a series of social and economic fallouts in the 80s, including the crack epidemic and AIDS crisis, the ensuing decade was wrought with sweeping disarray. Adrover took up work as a janitor and lived in a tiny East Village basement apartment with rodents for roommates. As he settled into the city, he was satiated by its vivid multiculturalism. The streets of New York are the ultimate mingling of social class, where a rich man in a perfectly tailored bespoke suit with a job in the financial district is seated next to a homeless man nodding off on the subway.
Despite his lack of formal training, Adrover quickly found his footing in the local fashion scene. In 1995, he opened Horn Boutique with Douglas Hobbs, a small store that sold experimental brands like Asfour and Alexander McQueen. Adrover and McQueen had been close friends dating back to the former’s travels London. McQueen actually received the call for Givenchy while he was at Adrover’s home in Majorca, and the two arranged photoshoots on the island including an editorial for McQueen’s “Highland Rape” collection that was deemed too explicit for the press. He worked on a few of the Londoner’s early collections, sleeping in the studio for months at a time and assisting with interns. As compensation, Adrover received pieces from the collections that were sold at Horn, and the boutique soon became a hub for avant-garde designers from all over the world. After a few years of owning the store, Adrover was encouraged to take the next step into design.The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center in the Lower East Side held Miguel Adrover’s debut collection, “Manaus-Chiapas NYC.” Dim lighting offered a faint glow, and tall reeds sheltered either side of the thin plywood catwalk. A nude model adorned an unsettling mask made from dozens of sticks, quickly flanked by makeshift tunics and dresses with submachine guns slung across the body. The show depicted the journey of refugees making their way to the United States from South America: in Manaus, they dressed themselves in the skin of a 15-foot python as they fled the industrialization of the Brazilian Amazon; they later armed themselves with guns and bullet straps during the civil war in Chiapas, Mexico; in New York, one wore a suit made from a hundred-year-old American flag and an unfinished dress pieced together with newspaper prints. Another fashioned a miniskirt out of a Louis Vuitton handbag. The most alluring piece was a dirtied “I <3 NY” shirt with ruffled poof sleeves, which poetically juxtaposed the social cachet of a mundane tourist shirt with something typically reserved for ballrooms.
The collection’s overt political sentiments were a far cry from the standard fashion fare of self-awareness discarded for escapism and bliss engendered by ignorance. Adrover was not shy to acknowledge the pain suffered in the real world, a disposition he maintained throughout his career. While the subject matter in this show was intense, Adrover’s references to non-European heritage were quite refreshing for such a eurocentric industry. Though designers have always explored different cultures, it’s often rooted in a sense of “exoticism,” while Adrover maintained a certain authenticity owed to his frequent global passages.Word spread like wildfire that there was a hot new item in fashion, but the buzz hadn’t filled Adrover’s pocket. He roamed the garment district on his bicycle at night, searching for discarded fabric bolts and scraps wherever he could find them. Ironically, he was only able to stage his second show with a $2000 reimbursement from Vogue when a few of his samples were stolen from a Conde Nast closet.A dollar bill stamped with an invitation marked AW 00’s “Midtown.” A supremely talented pauper is a fashion editor’s wet dream, and returning to the same venue as his debut, Adrover presented to a crowd that included Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington of American Vogue. The catwalk depicted a city intersection, with street traffic and scuttling rain as ambient accents to the soundtrack of soft classical music.
The collection asserted Miguel Adrover’s presence. The looks featured a heavy dose of asymmetry that mirrored New York’s polyphonic nature. High-low hemlines and bias-cut panels were used on soft knits and raw canvas alike. The shoulders of a navy sweater were replaced with Yankees ball caps, trousers with an Hermes belt resewn at the inseam then slashed and worked into a jacket. A model walked the runway with an inside-out Burberry trench coat, a gift from friend and patternmaker Peter Hidalgo. This caught Burberry’s attention, and the designer swiftly received a copyright lawsuit that was later dismissed. The collection’s standout was a tailored Victorian coat made from the salvaged and dirtied mattress covering of his neighbor, Quentin Crisp, who’d recently passed. His possessions were donated to the curb, including this mess of a bed that gave Adrover’s team rashes in the studio.
After his first two collections, the Spainard was a certifiable star. Adrover’s team worked to produce well-made garments that featured exceptional tailoring. Recalling Martin Margiela’s similar disregard for conventional luxury standards, Adrover was insistent in preserving the memory attached to garments. Linda Dresner, a boutique owner, told AnotherMag, “Miguel was the innovator of originality. With him, old became new again.” Following a much-needed investment from Pegasus Group, a burgeoning retail conglomerate at the turn of the century, Adrover was poised for international success. Yet four years later, he would be forced to close his label. The first leg was kicked without warning. After several visits to Egypt, the perpetual foreigner found beauty in the middle-eastern garb of sweeping, floor-length caftans, tunics, jodhpurs, and turbans. Turned off by fashion’s sexualized vanity, he looked to the modest and restrained style he discovered abroad. Both Fall 2000’s “Meet East” and Spring 2001’s “Utopia” featured these attires in direct conversation with Western clothing, hallmarked in the former by an old Coca-Cola shirt worn over a bleached and distressed pinstripe caftan that could’ve been hundreds of years old. The fabrics were some of the designer’s most muddied and aged, as if they were drawn straight from the Nile. The latter collection drew the same references, and the throughline of this “East meets West” moment was held together by a refined sense of elegance, a quality that Adrover maintained no matter how hectic his various inspirations were.
It was the worst timing imaginable. “Utopia” was shown in New York on September 8, 2001. A frenzied public, American and international alike, accused Adrover of being sympathetic towards the Taliban’s misogyny and conservatism. Thanks in part due to the economic fallout of 9/11 alongside the controversy, Pegasus Group closed his label. Financial setbacks set the tone for the rest of his career. Adrover returned independently a year later with his Spring 2003 collection, “Citizen of the World,” where he rediscovered the streets of New York. The notion of global citizenry was reinforced explicitly by a caftan printed with the United Nations logo. Adrover decided to show both menswear and womenswear together, a move that further illustrates his cultural savvy. The collection anticipated the streetwear that would dominate the 2000s: baggy t-shirt dresses next to tailored suits, bandanas and do-rags with long jean shorts and tank tops, a set of pinstripe vest and shorts layered over a navy sweatsuit. But Adrover just wasn’t turning a profit. At this point he was self-sufficient, using cash from his savings account to stage presentations. The stores that still trusted him had trouble receiving the orders on time, and when they did arrive, customers weren’t impressed. Linda Dresner, a boutique owner who believed in the talent, reckoned with the reality of it all: “But these have been difficult times, and although his clothes were always very handsome and beautifully made, they were not commercially easy. Business was at a point where we didn't feel like going out on a limb anymore.”
By this point, Adrover was showing only once a year, with the fashion calendar proving to be overwhelming. On his last leg, Adrover delivered Spring 2005’s “The Americans.” An exhaustive 96 look collection that illustrated the “Old West,” alluding to the rich visual history of cowboys and Native Americans. Many of Adrover’s hallmarks were present: a truly diverse casting of models including meso-American children hand-in-hand, strong tailoring, and an exploration of cultural clothing. Native motifs were blended with western suede and prairie gingham prints alongside classic American prep. A series of garments featured handmade cave-paintings of hands and buffalos. When a brand presents almost 100 looks, it’s hard not to think of it as throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. If this sense of desperation wasn’t gathered during the show, it was made quite apparent when an exuberant Adrover, hand-in-hand with friends, ran across the stage wearing a shirt that said, “anyone seen a backer?”
Out of money and out of spirit, Adrover said goodbye to America. “Bush was re-elected and I gave up,” he told Colleen Nika. “I didn't want to live in a country torn by war I didn't believe in anymore. And I spent all my savings.” In his struggle for an uncompromising artistic vision, the fashion industry and bottom-line won out. For Adrover, the “why” was far more important than the “how.” After 14 years in New York, “it was time to go.”By 2012, the fashion industry had morphed into the bloated monster we know today. The internet accelerated discourse and the global conversation forced business to move at a breakneck pace. The semiotics of clothing have diluted into simplistic symbols of social status, the same logos that Adrover mocked over a decade earlier. In an interview with Byronesque, Adrover lamented, “It’s hard to be a part of the industry in the way it works today. [Everything] is related to [corporations], related to [promoting] products that are not necessary, but we cannot get enough of it. You can never get enough of what you don’t need.” When asked what needs to change, the first thing he said was for LVMH to go into bankruptcy.Eight years after his last independent collection, Adrover returned to New York with Fall 2012’s “Out of My Mind.” To create something fresh, he lost contact with everything related to fashion, removing himself entirely from the ecosystem to explore a new vocabulary for clothing. In the same theater as his rapturous debut, he looked back to the Amazon where he imagined a tribe of natives finding a downed airplane with luggage scattered about. In a moment of complete circularity and sustainability, clothes were used just as they were: Adrover did not create any new garments, nor utilize patterns and sewing machines, sidestepping conventional construction and extracting beauty from the banality of everyday clothes.
With no intention to sell the collection, Adrover was freed of any notion of compromise. His total decontextualization of fashion informed the collection- much of the layering was indecipherable in brilliant manipulations and contortions of garments. As with any Miguel Adrover collection, there was an undercurrent of cultural references. Here, he drew inspiration from Western Asian costume, most notably in the knitwear and hats worn by Yemeni goat herders. Always one for humor, some of the footwear was made of hands shaped into middle fingers and devil horns. The return of the beloved designer was an emotional deluge for everyone involved, none more so than Adrover himself. 2012 felt like a curtain call for an artist who wanted, and needed, one last go at things. Afterwards, Adrover retreated to Majorca and settled into a hermetic lifestyle.Years later, while exploring the surrounding countryside of his family farm, Adrover stumbled across a covering that opened to a 300-year-old snake-infested well. The former designer shifted focus to photography, using the well as a studio for its intense lighting that recalls the dramatic shadows of “Caravaggio’s light.” Much of his new work shares the same experimentation with volume and drape established in his fashion design.
The inspiration that led Adrover to “Out of My Mind,” that compulsion to step back from the vulgarity of society, finds itself in much of his daily life– no drugs, no sex, and no cellphone for well over a decade. Yet contemporary culture often eschews these sentiments. In retrospect, Adrover’s eccentricity was that of a frantic seer shouting warnings of the impending apocalypse at indifferent passersby. Adrover’s influence extends into much of fashion today: Demna Gvalsalia clearly follows in the pursuit of a certain high-low fusion; Adrover’s raw, unfiltered approach and muddied romanticism is evident in someone like Elena Velez, a young designer dealing with the same financial problems and backlash that faced Adrover; and Adrover’s instinctual use of diverse and inclusive modeling is now the expectation. In the age of conveyor belt clothing and 2-D identities, any unease with the status quo is remedied with insipid commercialism. One must accept these terms; there’s little room for those who question the spectacle. Fashion could not afford Miguel Adrover.
