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from WWD...


CONTINENTAL SHIFT: It’s been a long and bumpy ride for designer Miguel Adrover, who, despite critical acclaim, has struggled perhaps more poignantly than some of his contemporaries to make his offbeat vision a financial success. Things have only gotten tougher since Adrover lost his financial backing in the wake of the failed experiment in American conglomerate building, Pegasus Apparel Group, which had bought his company as part of a spate of acquisitions in 2000, shortly after Adrover’s debut.
Although Adrover carries on, lack of adequate financing has now forced the designer to close his New York business altogether, with plans to reopen in the coming weeks in his home country of Spain, where he will be partially supported by a government grant to build a new studio. According to a spokeswoman for the designer, Adrover is hoping to find a more receptive audience for his designs in Europe than he experienced in the U.S., where his frequent exploration of Middle Eastern dress and unorthodox approach to brand building has stirred up plenty of controversy, but not enough sales.

[metal-on-metal]

That's sad. He's so talented and I love his vision. His spring collection was perfect. But yes, I agree that Europe would be more receptive to his designs. I hope to see him in Paris by spring 2006!

[metal-on-metal]

I just reviewed his spring show again. It was so real and so beautiful. Few New York designers are able to truly capture a real essence of city living. And by that, I don't mean people like Michael Kors or Tuleh and their park avenue princesses or Marc Jacobs and his cliche "downtown cool"--whatever that means. Miguel is about real people, living their real lives. This collection was about that, for me, and it's sad that it won't ever reach store shelves. There are some really wearable pieces there.

http://www.style.com/fashionshows/collecti...review/MADROVER

[Atelier]

Tuesday's longer article, again from WWD.

Quote:

Tuesday December 7, 2004 Adrover Packs Up, Moves to Majorca By Eric Wilson NEW YORK — In the end, Miguel Adrover couldn’t beat the system. The designer, whose fortunes have turned from bad to good to worse, referred to his spring fashion show in September as his “last battle” for retail relevance and basic survival, following the last of 100 models onto the runway wearing a T-shirt that read, “Anyone seen a backer?” It was the final stand in Adrover’s brief and curiously antagonistic campaign to change the fashion industry. Once heralded as the Next Big Thing for his ironic tweaking of brand icons and his none-too-subtle references against fashion imperialism, Adrover has more recently been described by some as the designer who cried wolf. On Monday, sitting in his Chrystie Street studio amid hundreds of packing boxes that contained the relics of his career, Adrover admitted defeat. His collections are no longer carried by any stores in the U.S., having lost his final two accounts this year, and sales from private clients could not cover the $3,500 a month rent he pays for the studio. Adrover said he was unable to secure financing to continue to produce a collection in New York and that he plans to move his company to Majorca, where he was born, with the hopes of finding a more receptive audience, and possibly a new backer, for his unique brand of politically infused fashion statements. “With the political situation here, it’s the perfect time to be moving the company,” Adrover said. “If we didn’t get financing in the past few years, I don’t think we will be getting it now. At least, not in the next four years.” Adrover’s story is part industry legend, part cautionary tale. Young designers still come up to him on the street, recalling the headlines he made in 2000 when he created one of the most buzzed-about collections in years, his second, on virtually a shoestring budget while living in a basement apartment in the East Village with supposedly only a few bucks in his bank account. He moved to New York from Spain, first working as a janitor, then breaking into the fashion business with a job at a former T-shirt collection called Dugg, then opening a store in 1995 called Horn that attracted an influential crowd of editors and designers. Soon Adrover wanted to launch his own collection and rallied a team of volunteers to work on the project, based on their belief in his talent. He sent out invitations with the details stamped on $1 bills, so when the guests arrived, he got his money back. For raw materials, Adrover was equally frugal, restyling discarded Burberry coats and New York Yankees baseball caps and the ticking of a mattress reputed to belong to the late Quentin Crisp. Mixed with a selection of finely tailored blouses and suits, the audience sensed a success and heaped lavish praise on the collection, leading to a battle between retailers to carry it and, within a few weeks, an investment from the newly formed Pegasus Apparel Group, a company backed by a private equity fund looking to create an American version of a luxury conglomerate. Adrover was able to move his company into a new studio and got a Jaguar as part of the deal. But that success also turned out to be his downfall, perhaps in a case of poetic justice. His ill-timed embrace of Middle Eastern dress in his 2001 collections came just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, while Pegasus was having its own problems. The conglomerate dropped its support of Adrover after just a year when the designer lost favor with editors, who considered his ego had gotten too big, and with stores, which were unhappy with the performance of his retail debut. But Adrover pressed on, mending some of those fences and continuing to show collections with financial support from companies such as U.P.S., working with a team of volunteers he recruited from design schools around the world and invited into his studio each season. The work maintained its polarizing effect. “We got to a point where we had tried and tried and tried,” Adrover said. “We held on for three years after Pegasus dropped us. But we decided the best way is to try someplace else, where we might get backing. I can’t put my team in place one more time when I don’t know if I can do this.” Under Pegasus, Adrover’s collection was picked up by top specialty stores including Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys New York and Jeffrey New York, generating sales of $5 million at its peak. But after Pegasus closed, only Henri Bendel and Jeffrey New York continued to support the designer in the U.S. Adrover said he sold about $70,000 to $100,000 worth of clothes from his 2003 collections, but that Bendel’s had recently informed him that it would not continue to carry the line. Jeffrey Kalinsky, owner of Jeffrey New York, said he’d bought Adrover’s women’s collection for the spring 2003 season but it was never produced. The last collection he carried from the designer came from a men’s footwear license, delivered that season. “Miguel is a very talented designer and I think he will still make it,” Kalinsky said. “I think that he has wonderful talent, but he had a lot of misfortune. His problems had to do with bad circumstances that were beyond his control, but I hope what is a sad thing for us turns out to be a great thing for Miguel.” Adrover is optimistic about his chances in Europe, where he hopes to be able to stage a show in Paris next September. Joan Solivellas, a former fashion executive who resides in Majorca, is helping him set up his studio there in the Palau Veri, a former palace that now houses art galleries and a retail complex. The local government is also offering assistance, Adrover said, noting he would like to establish his own fashion school. His studio manager, Oscar Correcher, and design director, Peter Hidalgo, are planning to join him there. Adrover said he is leaving New York on Dec. 15, the day after his 39th birthday. He characterized his decision to move the company as a disappointment and criticized several companies and designers that have enjoyed more recent successes than his own. He lost the Jaguar when Pegasus closed his line in 2001. In Majorca, he will have a horse. “I cannot change anything,” he said. “I think it’s fair what happened. We played with the rules. We took risks. If I wanted to be at the top of the New York fashion industry, I could have been there if I played the game. You can manipulate the New York scene very easily. But it is not representative of what is really going on in the streets of New York. What the fashion industry embraces now, I feel very sad about that. They only care about the bling-bling.” Adrover’s stinging rebukes of designer brands and personalities in both his collections and in comments made during interviews have sometimes met with a receptive audience. His message, shown season after season in a United Nations-worthy blending of tribal costumes, hip-hop streetwear and WASP-tailored suits, was an appealing embrace of multiple classes of societies and cultures. But his enthusiasm — some have said zealotry — was a turn-off for others, who pointed out that like Tom Ford or Ralph Lauren, Adrover, too, still had something to sell. His ego checked, Adrover said he understands their point of view, but had he the chance to start over, he said he would have done the same. “I think the message has been understood, it’s just that a lot of people don’t want to support that message,” Adrover said. “So many people ask me, ‘Why do you mix politics with clothing?’ I find that offensive. Politics is what’s going to affect my life today and tomorrow, not fashion. Fashion is going to only affect my wallet.”

[Scott]

Just face it,America,is the banality capital of the world. People swim with every shifting trend and plastic illusion. The fashion system & media is as equally disgusting. I think Miguel was caught up in this hype machine created during his highlighted seasons when everybody was praising so-called "Avant-Garde"....just when the meaning of the term began to get sucked dry.

I really hope that Miguel will be able to seek some sort of solidarity in Europe. Its long overdue. No more mindless games of support then non-support. I think he deserves long-term appreciation. And Europeans....they are alot smarter and definitely alot more open.

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A look from Adrover’s 2004 collection shown in September.

[faust]

So sad

Here is an article from the NYTimes

Quote:

A Designer's Incredible Rise and Inevitable Fall By GUY TREBAY Can it have been just five years ago that Miguel Adrover was being hailed as the hope of American fashion? Back in September 1999, the first collection by an unknown designer, presented in a theater on the Lower East Side, upstaged all the marquee names of the moment. Critics from publications with reader profiles as unalike as those of Vogue and Paper fell over themselves praising the wit, élan and craftsmanship behind Mr. Adrover's efforts: a miniskirt pieced from a salvaged Louis Vuitton bag, a strapless dress smudged with paint and appliquéd with scraps of graffiti, a dress made of ticking from Quentin Crisp's mattress, another from T-shirts and materials sold on the street. They also found in his biography such good copy that tales of Mr. Adrover's past often read like fiction. How many designers, after all, were raised on almond farms on small Mediterranean islands? By the time Mr. Adrover's next collection rolled around, in February 2000, the designer was awash in glowing press. "In 2000, he was the shining star," said Jeffrey Kalinsky, the owner of Jeffrey New York. Retailers, normally a conservative group, lined up to place orders for the output of Mr. Adrover's ad hoc studio, which then amounted to the designer; his patternmaker, Peter Hidalgo; and several talented volunteers. Some store owners, like Mr. Kalinsky and Linda Dresner, with shops in Manhattan and Birmingham, Mich., even broke with precedent and said they would be willing to write checks to back his line. It would be hard to imagine a more promising blueprint for commercial success. But things quickly went sour for the designer, in ways emblematic of the difficulties now faced by any newcomer to the business. Thus the cautionary tale that is the career of Miguel Adrover completed its arc in just a handful of seasons. Having arrived in New York 14 years ago from Majorca, Miguel Adrover is packing up to quit the city he calls "the whole point of living" and going home. "I feel it's a pity, because we gave a voice to the multicultural city," the designer said last week, as he sat in the Chrystie Street loft where he both lived and worked, surrounded by packing boxes crammed with examples of his cerebral, often sculptural and superbly executed designs. His departure date is next week, the day after he turns 39. That the designer is gifted was never in question. "There's no doubt in my mind that he's incredibly talented," said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, until recently among the designer's most stalwart supporters. "He never had bad shows, shows where you didn't want to wear the clothes." In fact, the shows themselves, often held in unlikely settings — a synagogue, an East Village park, a public school courtyard transformed into a classical arena — gave proof of his gifts for theatricalism, organization and, not least, public relations. It did not seem to matter that the presentations were scheduled off the official Seventh on Sixth roster or that they were mounted in parts of town where editors are rarely seen. People came out in droves. "He had five separate people from Vogue sitting on a bench on the Lower East Side," Ms. Gilhart said. Among those people were Anna Wintour, the stylist Camilla Nickerson and Candy Pratts Price, the fashion director of Style.com, any one of whom has the ability to anoint a designer's career. "I remember that show," Ms. Price said yesterday, laughing. "That was the one with the goat that wouldn't come down the runway." In fact the balky animal used in the show's finale was a sheep. Was it put there to suggest something about the followers of fashion? Odds are it was. Among the criticisms leveled at Mr. Adrover by his detractors is that his work was too political, his politics too naïve or else just postures, his agenda too provocative to make commercial sense. "Fashion lives in a bubble," an unrepentant Mr. Adrover said. "We're not going to show pink flower dresses on the catwalk if people are in the world throwing bombs." This was a reference, perhaps, to a show in Paris last October at which the designers Viktor & Rolf presented models wearing ribboned pink dresses and gave each audience member a gift of their first fragrance, which comes in a bottle shaped like a grenade and is called Flowerbomb. As it happens, it was politics that led to Mr. Adrover's downfall, but the global kind rather than fashion's parochial kind. First his career fell prey to a bubble economy when the nascent American conglomerate Pegasus Group invested in his business in 2000 and then went bankrupt a year later, leaving him without resources to meet his obligations. There were problems with sourcing, pricing and shipping, Ms. Gilhart said. Barneys had decided to drop the line even before bad luck and timing conspired in a collection Mr. Adrover called Utopia, with clothes inspired by Islam and the Middle East, and presented in a Lower East Side schoolyard on Sept. 9, 2001. Mr. Adrover resurrected his business and continued showing, including what may have been his most mature collection last fall, and installing his designs in a special boutique at Henri Bendel. But it was not enough. "Yes, Pegasus was a big mistake, yet it was also a good opportunity to reach a much larger audience," Ms. Dresner said. "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." Ms. Dresner stopped buying Mr. Adrover's clothes. It is one thing to be talented and subversive, but, she said, "you also have to understand the world that you're talking to." What is that world? "Our world today is not one where you can have a group of people just living like artists and sharing a bottle of wine," Ms. Price said. The commercial demands of the business are too pressing, she suggested, to leave room for practitioners more involved with conceptual issues than the bottom line. "Where's the Robert Duffy?" she asked. She was speaking of the business partner most industry people agree has made Marc Jacobs's career possible. "Miguel had imaginative ideas, terrific talent, a very supportive staff, but it takes a businessman next to you. You need someone to say to the fabric salesman, `If we buy 60 yards of this, what can you do for us if we get the whole bolt?' "

[softgrey]

eh...i was never a fan...

[softgrey]

i think if you have a political agenda...you have to be an extraordinary talent for people to be willing to swallow the whole package...because fashion is essentially a frivolous world...

i think someone along the lines of a hussein chalayan gets away with it because his designs are extraordinary and original...(but even he has made concessions to commercialism this past season)

i see nothing special about androver's clothes...and then there is the so-called 'skirt' which i borowed for a shoot which was just a yard of fabric with a couple of safety pins...hardly a 'design'...the first collection he did with 'found' clothing was interesting and clever (remeber the backwards burberry trench coat dress or the top with baseball cap shoulders?)...but as soon as he got away from that...i lost interest completely...imo...just another zac posen-type media darling...hyped up to be the next best thing...but without the clothing and business sense tto actually back it up...

[faust]

The only designer who ever got away with the political agenda was Raf Simons. Chalayan and Watanabe did it, but in much subtler ways, so it did not have to neccessarily interpreted as a political agenda.

[softgrey]

i don't know faust...
rei kawakubo does is too... gaultier did the whole hassidic thing...(though probably less as a political statement and more just because he liked the look... :P )

kenneth cole is VERY political...but it's in the marketing...the clothes are still wearable...

moschino was the first to put 'fashion victim' on a piece of expensive designer clothing...but it was done with a sense of humour...

i think a lot of it is how you present it...you may serve the same dish with a fancy garnish and without and people will automatically believe that the fancy one tastes better...even if it is exactly the same ingredients...

i think androver was a lot of garnish and not very tasty... :P

[Scott]

I wouldn't say that. Hussein is just as blatant in his political agenda as Miguel. Noting his collection with the battle scenes inspired by the conflict in Cyprus and the one inspired by traditional dress. I just think Americans are way too fragile and defensive about such matters right now.

[liberty33r1b]

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Originally posted by softgrey@Dec 7 2004, 11:36 AM ...imo...just another zac posen-type media darling...hyped up to be the next best thing...but without the clothing and business sense tto actually back it up... [snapback]454886[/snapback]

but Zac Posen's clothes do actually have character, giving full credit to that. i just feel like you can't really compare those two (just because both showed in NYC?) in terms of the medía attraction they received....
hopefully miguel is gonna do better in spain, which i think is better ground for him anyways

[softgrey]

Quote:

Originally posted by liberty33r1b@Dec 7 2004, 12:04 PM but Zac Posen's clothes do actually have character, giving full credit to that. i just feel like you can't really compare those two (just because both showed in NYC?) in terms of the medía attraction they received.... hopefully miguel is gonna do better in spain, which i think is better ground for him anyways [snapback]454913[/snapback]

zac was just an easy example of someone eslse who i think has done a couple of good things and got a lot of attention...but then failed to take it to the next level...

unlike someone like olivier theyskens or alexander mcqueen or viktor and rolf who all got a loads of attention but then proved that they were the 'real deal'...

it has nothing to do with ny...

[mikeijames]

i guess his shirt fell on deaf ears (or blind eyes)?...