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.”
