LONDON:Miguel Adrover, the designer who disappeared from the fashion radar since he left New York three years ago, is making a comeback.
Adrover, 41, now based in his native Majorca, is not only taking part in "New York Fashion Now," an exhibition that opens on Tuesday at London's Victoria & Albert museum. The designer with a strong social agenda is also in discussions with a global fashion company, according to information circulating in London.
Reached in Majorca, Adrover would not discuss any future plans but said that he had relocated his studio to Palma de Mallorca, where he has built up a private clientele, as well as creating recycled clothing, following his long-term "green" aesthetic.
"For me it has been a good time to think and analyze and make the philosophy of the company more understandable," says the designer.
Given Adrover's exceptional tailoring skills and creative intelligence, it has been a mystery why he was not chased by European houses after he left America.
The designer went to New York in 1991, set up Horn boutique in Manhattan's East Village in 1995, and founded his own label in 1999. In the forefront of fighting fashion's global, logo-mad culture, he famously made elegant clothes by recycling a ticking mattress and a Burberry raincoat. His show of multicultural clothing with Arab inspiration was later viewed as a prescient vision of terrorist events.
Adrover won critical acclaim and awards for collections that he showed once a year. But after his backer, Pegasus Group, withdrew, he was forced to close his studio with his last collection for spring/summer 2005.
Sonnet Stanfill, the curator of the V & A show, uses Adrover as an example of the difficulty of setting up in fashion, while celebrating the fact that 20 designers emerged in New York between 1999-2004, including current names such as Proenza Schouler and Zac Posen.
Adrover, who opened his own space in Majorca and counts art, photography and poetry among his interests, is still doubtful about big brand fashion.
"In the way we see clothing, we have lost the sense of the industry," he says. "We have lost contact with reality and it needs to change."
