Antonio Alvarado: "You can't get out of fashion"
If Antonio Alvarado (Pinoso, Alicante, 1954) can give lessons, it is because he has learned them all beforehand. "I appear at a time when Spanish haute couture was dying. Those of my generation criticized it to the point of saying enough. I remember going to buy Balenciaga crystal stockings for my fashion shows that were at a whore price in El Corte Inglés. Balenciaga was Franco, she was Franco's wife, a carcamal like the top of a pine tree. I'm talking about the year [19] 76", he recalls. From that break with tradition – which, unlike France, in Spain has never served for anything, he stresses – finally comes recognition. "For opening the way for generations of designers by addressing social issues that have taken on a new dimension today, such as identity or sustainability," reported the ministerial press release announcing his award, on Tuesday of the week pass. She still hasn't given him time to clarify his ideas and she doesn't want to rush. "Everything is going too fast now," she says. When reciting the reasons why it has been awarded (almost unanimously), he lets out a hint of laughter, mocking: "Wait, I'll tell you about sustainability. I was in the same vein as the Japanese who were beginning to show up with a totally radical for the time. A sequin gave me creeps, and I was drawn to that aesthetic of poverty, of fabrics that seemed old. I arrived in Madrid with a collection like that, zero glitter, and that was inspired by the movement of the new romantics Because the dull new romantic is difficult. But they bought it for me in Ararat, Double AA, Oh Calcutta and all the gang of modern stores...".
– Wasn't what was sustainable before rather a question of precariousness?
– Sure, there was the economy. Imagine having to buy fabrics, pay to take them to wash and then destroy them. Luckily, some friends brought me towels from the toilets of all the bars in Madrid, those of the roller for drying your hands, a very complicated thing to work with because they were pieces of 30 or 40 centimeters, and you had to be sewing what sewed you, that the stripes marry you well... Once, I wanted a black viscose knit with a lot of drape. Total, I ended up in Menkes, where the vedettes, and I bought all the meters I could and some more of cheap mesh, the one with which Norma Duval made her bodies to wear under the rhinestones. When putting it in the machines, look, more races were made than in the stockings, because the machines were not knitted, of course. Well, I made a virtue of that. Some wonderful dresses came out, with batwing sleeves full of bobbles. Lucía Bosé appeared with one on the cover of El País Semanal, me without realizing it, and Massiel calls me very early on Sunday morning, please, we had to meet that same afternoon, that he was going to release an album and that wanted. That was my way of differentiating myself from others, a little older than me and who had been in the business for some time, such as Pepe Rubio, Pedro del Hierro, Francis Montesinos or Manuel Piña.
