The Designer Miguel Adrover Has A Few Things to Say

You have a monopoly that shuts the doors to everyone else.

Even in fashion schools now you are training young people to be creative servants. Their biggest hope is to get hired by a corporation like LVMH.

I went to fashion school. You are trained to want one of those jobs. So much in fashion has changed…

They study John Galliano and all those designers and then when you look at the runways you see copies. That’s how they [corporations] maintain the structure that supports them.

I think I was a sort of spice in the salad of fashion. You need to be careful, because they also need someone that sows some discord, because it makes everything more exciting now that everything has been bought off. But in the end, you also become part of it because they take advantage of you.

What’s also tough today is that there are no more critics. I remember back then, Cathy Horyn and Suzy Menkes… criticism was very different then. Now Cathy Horyn walks the runway for Demna and Balenciaga, and he puts her in a look exactly like one of mine from “Out of My Mind” [Adrover’s last show, Fall/Winter 2012], and she doesn’t say anything about it, right?

I’ve influenced many people. Many young designers out there are influenced by me. Some don’t know it, but there are a lot who do know and don’t say anything.

I’m curious about how you feel about seeing your work influence others knowing that not everyone is citing you as a reference.

No one cites my work. Demna, for example, who is now doing Gucci, has literally copied my work from the beginning. I did UPS, he did DHL. I did the New York Yankees, and the man who did Gucci before and Valentino now, [Alessandro] Michele, did it too. All of this appropriation…I think we have to revisit my work, really. The inclusion aspect too.

You changed fashion, but also the look of fashion too. The casting, the people on the runway…

My work was not about extravagant dresses with lots of feathers or anything like that. I wanted to embrace the common and the quotidian. On my runway, you could find a Wall Street executive and a homeless man, a cleaning lady from Queens carrying a plastic bag. There were characters you had never seen on the runway before. Now everything has a name, like “normcore.” I was normcore before the word even existed.

In some ways, when I see it, I’m happy, and in others it angers me. These days it’s so easy to bury people. These days, what you do today doesn’t have meaning tomorrow because there’s something new. It’s just… wow.