Everything you need to know about Miguel Adrover

The photos he posts on Instagram look like oil paintings, and his styling still manages to defy fashion conventions despite being catapulted into the contemporary world: although his brand was founded more than 20 years ago, it is still impossible not to marvel at Miguel Adrover's designs. A slap in the face to the eccentric, over-coloured and accessorized but often empty fashion world of the Naughties, Adrover's collections were immediately recognised for their originality and underground style.  And yet, only a few years after the brand's creation, Miguel Adrover disappeared completely from the calendars of New York Fashion Week. His fashion sustainable, inclusive and political failed to survive the glitz and glamour of y2k, but it has now managed to re-enter the conversations of archival fashion enthusiasts, a no-longer-hidden treasure celebrated on Pinterest and TikTok by a niche of collectors. 

A Majorcan in New York City

Miguel Adrover Fall 2000 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2000 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2000 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2000 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2001 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2002 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2002 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2002 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2002 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2002 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2002 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2002 Ready-to-Wear

Born in Calonge on the island of Majorca in 1965, Adrover left school at the age of twelve to help his parents in their almond farm. A self-taught fashion designer, he spent some time in Madrid in the company of world-famous director Pedro Almodóvar before landing in New York in the late 1990s. Between 1999 and 2000, his first collections attracted the attention of Anna Wintour, then chief editor of Vogue USA, and Cathy Horn, a journalist for the New York Times, as well as his first and only backer, Pegasus. During those years, Adrover received the Perry Ellis Award and was crowned Best Vanguardist Designer by Vogue; his career was propelled to the top of the industry even before he founded his eponymous brand, thanks to the success of his first Manaus-Chiapas-NYC line and a special shoutout from none other than Alexander McQueen at the British designer's show, Joan. Each of the Majorcan designer's designs was unique as they were often created with fabrics made from used sheets, towels and clothes, even designer clothes. One of the looks from his second collection, the Fall 2000 Ready-to-Wear, featured a model wearing an upside-down Burberry trench coat, remodelled but belonging to the British fashion house in a more than obvious way. This and other reworkings - which in this case cannot be called dupes - such as Louis Vuitton's bags or Ralph Lauren's polo shirts, motivated all the brands in question to file copyright complaints, but failed to stop it. Adrover's experiments were not limited to designer brand logoed clothing: his are the Marlboro shirt, an iconic I Heart New York t-shirt with ruffled sleeves, now the subject of the permanent exhibition at the Met in New York, and a completely stained baseball jersey with the Coca-Cola logo. All of these designs were the result of Adrover's critical observation of New York's Downtown, where he worked, and expressed in a surprisingly minimalist way his eye for multiculturalism, social inequality and other controversies in the United States, translated into sartorial clothing of excellent quality. In addition to this inspiration, what made the garments a success in the eyes of the American press and customers was the extremely street feel of the collections, which combined feminine silhouettes with hip hop details, or the rigour of a pinstripe suit or an army green uniform with a rare sensitivity in the choice of materials and combinations.

Inclusivity or cultural appropriation?

Miguel Adrover Spring 2003 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2004 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2005 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2005 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear

Miguel Adrover Spring 2005 Ready-to-Wear

In 2001, the year of the bursting of the economic bubble that three years later would force his investor to declare bankruptcy, and of the attack on the Twin Towers, Adrover's artistic direction undergone a clear change of direction.  The designer began to shift his gaze to cultures even further away from his own, to deepen the political approach of his creations, giving his collections increasingly direct, emotionally charged, humanitarian messages. Travelling around Egypt for a few weeks, he studied the country's oriental costume, bringing it back in the Fall 2001 and Spring 2002 collections in kaftans, burkas and Arab lithams, long bands of cloth that desert men historically use to wrap around their heads to protect themselves from the wind and sand.For the show Meeteast, journalist Suzy Menkes wrote in 2001, Adrover even hired a black sheep to walk alongside a model. This passion for distant cultures that has informed so many of Adrover's collections is one of the designer's most controversial aspects. Perhaps the one detail that would prevent his eventual success in the contemporary fashion industry, - given the wide attention critics and fans pay to cultural appropriation - but at the same time, a point in his favour in terms of inclusiveness. Even before it was fashionable, the casting of Adrover's fashion shows introduced faces from disparate ethnicities and bodies quite different from those of the models that were in vogue in the early 2000s, very often including friends and family of the designer himself.

Where is he now? 

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Un post condiviso da Miguel Adrover (@migueladroverofficial)

There have been several reasons behind the disappearance of Adrover and his brand from the Fashion Week calendars, from the lack of financial support - at the end of the Spring 2005 show, Adrover appeared on the catwalk with a T-shirt reading «anyone see a backer?» - to the lack of international press support, but these were reinforced even by the designer's strong moral and ethical sense. In 2007, Adrover accepted the position of creative director heading the eco-conscious German brand Hess Natur, a position he held until 2013. Returning to the catwalk in 2012, the Majorcan designer reintroduced his own brand to the industry with a collection that left many puzzled, but just as many enthusiastic: the looks included a dress created with milleraies shirts tied together, a wool suit decorated with cat-shaped puppets, and silhouettes that fused the stylistic codes of the Middle East with those of the United States. The collection was disjointed but clear in its sharing of a message of peace. Confirming his commitment to the environmental cause, Adrover has now returned to live in Majorca, working with the Extinction Rebellion movement. On the island, the designer creates clothes out of materials from his archive, firmly continuing his repurposing project. What remains for his fans, unless they have been lucky enough to acquire one of his designs, are the striking images Adrover posts on his Instagram page, a sensational portfolio «to be seen as a whole,» featuring his dog Nin, often covered in majestic floral compositions, and self-portraits expressing the same inimitable cosmopolitan and sophisticated style that even managed to shock New York twenty years ago. The equally impactful captions inspire readers to reflect on the future of humanity and the Planet, dedications that Adrover makes to each of us in a sincere manner, as has always been his creative flow.