Helena Lopez del Hierro, the director of the Costume Museum, already told us about it when MagasIN interviewed her a few months ago. The exhibition Antonio Alvarado: Low Couture was his big bet for the fall: “We are especially excited because, when he was awarded the National Fashion Design Award last year, we were already working on Antonio’s exhibition, and it also allows us to finish the research we had on the emergence of Spanish fashion in the mid-80s.”

During the presentation to the media, Helena Lopez del Hierro explained that they have worked for six years on this retrospective, one of the ones that has involved the most effort and enthusiasm on the part of the entire team: “Antonio asked us that his work could not be separated from “his experiences. He has gone through his memories, his life, his creations… along with his son, Iván Alvarado, and Juan Gutiérrez, curator of the Costume Museum, who are the curators of the exhibition.”

The designer, poet of the movement with threads and fabrics that no one had used before, attended the press conference with his traditional humility and listened with blushing to the praise of his work: “Antonio’s clothes are ironic clothes, they create fun things and even sometimes, if I may use the term, a little naughty, but always with excellent tailoring,” added the director of the Costume Museum.

Juan Gutiérrez, one of the two curators, emphasized the importance of Alvarado’s work to understand the fashion of the so-called “Madrid movement”: “Antonio’s work is crucial because, on the one hand, he is closely linked to the international avant-garde but “It also preserves that very native style, a sign of the neo-chasticism of the late 70s and early 80s.”

The person in charge of the contemporary fashion collection of the Costume Museum, He explained “what a privilege it has been to have the creator recreate” his garments again to display them along with posters, jewelry, drawings and accessories. “And although the role of fashion in society tends to be trivialized, his work helps to better understand the revolution that Alvarado represented for Spanish fashion at that time.”

And of the later ones because, Among the specialized press, the verdict was unanimous: Most of what is on display seems to have been designed yesterday, by one of the young emerging talents that come out of fashion schools every year.

“Creativity does not abandon him for a moment,” added Juan Gutiérrez, to explain the connections that can be seen, throughout the entire route, with images of parades, television archives and film fragments, demonstrating that Alvarado understood before many things that today we take for granted and established.

Antonio Alvarado was born in Alicante but, when he came to live in Madrid, his love for the capital was instantaneous. And, unlike other creators, who denigrated the homeland dazzled by what was outside, he is determined to recover that cultural legacy and transfer the fashion that the street wears to the catwalks.

As Almudena Grandes wrote in the magazine White garlic, reference of the movement, in March 1991, Alvarado was the “most perverse couturier of the innocent Fashion of Spain”, and his clothes communicated things that no other creator considered introducing into the language of fashion.

“Beyond the clothes, beyond the adornment, Alvarado drew a direct line between the street and the catwalk, between the disco and the ballroom, between society and fashion. His, more than any other, It is a fashion that tells us about the reality of a country that tries to forge a new identity without giving up everything that has traditionally been”, explains the magnificent catalogue.

With his characteristic glasses (like those of Woody Allen), his bomber jacket and his flat cap, Alvarado, who He has always been a traditional dandy, He explained that “what the exhibition does is a social reading, because I don’t like clothes locked in an urn but in the context where they were created, lived…”.

In one of the paintings he can be seen with his son Iván, co-commissioner and conservator of his father’s legacy and portrayed when he was just a child. Time has been kind to both of them, who look like something out of a Martin Scorsese film about Italians in New York.

Both Helena López del Hierro and Juan Gutiérrez and the designer himself emphasized that the exhibition would not have been possible without the almost fifty friends and clients who have donated the garments and accessories that they have kept with care and affection in their closets, throughout throughout these forty years.

Among the providers, there are many well-known names. Alvarado saw before many that fashion was a means of expression like music and cinema. And so, he dressed groups like Mecano, La Década Prodigiosa, Azúcar Moreno or the Germans Europe, and singers like Tino Casal, Alaska, Luz Casal, Rocío Dúrcal, Bernardo Bonezzi, Víctor Coyote and Jaime Urrutia.

He also contributed key elements in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, like the coffee-pot earrings that María Barranco wore in Women at the edge of a nervous attack and the printed shirt The law of Desire, as well as for other films by Bigas Luna and for stage shows by Fabio McNamara, Antonia Andreu and Carlos Saura. “I’m very nervous and I don’t know how to stop,” explained the designer.

That’s why, Among his clients there is a long list of actresses and actors, such as Eusebio Poncela, Rossy de Palma, Carmen Maura, Marisa Paredes or María Barranco. Antonio Banderas and Ana Leza got married dressed by Alvarado, who was also a pioneer in believing that it was possible to make unconventional wedding dresses.

He also collaborated with artists such as Julio Juste, Javier Furia, Costus, Carlos Berlanga and Diabéticas Aceleradas, and with key cultural personalities such as the Bosé sisters, Paloma Chamorro, Marta Moriarty and Blanca Sánchez Berciano, who have lent pieces to be exhibited. Alvarado recalled that among his clients, “there were many more non-famous than famous ones.”

The extraordinary nature of the exhibition is confirmed by seeing how the Costume Museum has chosen for the first time to extend a monographic exhibition to two spaces in the building, occupying a total area of ​​close to 1,000 m2.

They display 130 models, in addition to bags, shoes, sketches, photographs, plastic works and other elements that offer a very complete vision of the designer’s creative and vital universe.

In 1983, Antonio Alvarado presented Low Couture, the first fashion show that was seen in the Rock-Ola room that explained the choice of the title: “It was called Low Couture to give it an identity, because when I started Haute Couture it was falling”.

However, he specified: “Fashion neither rises nor falls and this one is not lower than the other. But there are models and materials that are made with flashes and red carpets in mind while this one is made for people on the street.” “. To add later: “The street is life. The rest is fantasy.”

Alvarado has not lost one bit of the bitingness with which he has always expressed himself and created: “Now that Yoko Ono has gone out of fashion to blame her, everyone wants to look like each other, instead of looking at each other.” mirror and look for oneself, analyze oneself”.

As he himself wrote in The Moon of Madrid, in 1984: “I seek to discover the genuineness of each person and revalue with my clothes the expressiveness of their bodies, the way they vomit and move with my clothes.”

In that tireless search to dress those who struggled to find their own style, the designer recalled: “Before there were not so many stores and you had to look for a lot of life: go to London, New York… Now everything is canned in the shop windows”.

He was one of the founders of the then Pasarela Cibeles in Madrid and the promoter of the Pasarela Circuit de Barcelona; Also, one of the first to value the need to protect the fashion industry, its artisans and emerging talent.

Antonio Alvarado was awarded the 2021 National Fashion Design Award, but, with this exhibition, “I have felt loved again,” he commented, while describing himself as “heavy, insistent, perfectionist because it is the way I work.”

In 2012 he decided to leave his firm inactive. Ten years later, here it is still, non-stop. The original MRôlo mannequins help to convey the irony, provocation and scenic impact of his creations and to reflect the groundbreaking spirit of the culture of the end of the last century in Spain. You can check it out in this image gallery.

His fashion, in which spectacle and playfulness coexisted with technical precision, tailoring and intellectuality, anticipated social trends such as unisex and recycling. He, who was one of the first designers to use recycled and sustainable fabrics, criticized today’s “immediate consumption” and “excess branding.”

Next February 5th will mark 40 years since, in 1983, Francisco Umbral wrote in The country: “Antonio Alvarado presents ‘low fashion’. The ethical fury has reached rags.” Come and see.

The exhibition will be open to the public until March 26, 2023.

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