Sybilla — Queen of Spanish Fashion in New York
Last Friday I had the pleasure to attend a conversation between Sybilla, a Spanish fashion designer and Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. After 10 years absence Sybilla returns with a new collection to the fashion world. She has been considered one of the greatest fashion designers in Spain since Balenciaga.
When I saw her on the stage at FIT, I thought there was something quintessentially Spanish about her. She was wearing bright red leather coat, black turtleneck, black pants and sneakers. Red is a very important color in her recent collection, which refers to the ancient trio of black, red and white. She said at one point that if you were wearing red it made you feel like you can eat the world. Sybilla was born in New York city from a Polish mother, a fashion designer, and Argentinian father. Soon after that her family moved to Spain and that is where she truly believes she is from.
Her career in fashion started very early, as she was lucky to be an apprentice cutter/seamstress at YSL at the age of 17. At the age of 20 she showed her first collection in Spain. The 1980’s were really a time of a booming success for such a young an inexperience designer, as she was a part of very lively Madrid cultural scene and she surely approach style in a different way than her competition. Her clothes were not loud, they were very structural, had era of nostalgia about them and were full of play and joy. She invited actresses, (Rossy de Palma, a muse of Pedro Almodovar) and famous models like Helena Christensen to her fashion shows. Although as she said last Friday when she designs what is in her mind was to make every woman happy, as nowadays she worries that even young women who come to her studio suffer from deeply lowered self-esteem and self-criticism.
Via Sybilla — Winter 2015 Collection
After 30 years from her fashion debut she feels more confident and more experienced as a designer and she does not care any more about creating a long lasting impressions, which is such a big part of the contemporary fashion world. Her winter collection is about what every woman needs, “multiple variation on a black coat”, which is a classic staple in every woman’s wardrobe.
During the last 10 years she was designing home accessories, as well as gardens, landscapes and entire communities in Mexico, Costa Rica and Majorca based on the premise of a better, more sustainable and conscious world.
Her most recent collection emphasizes her obsession with body-conscious clothes, clothes which worship the body of a woman. Some of the coats and dresses have no seams, are hand-made and materials are cut in special places to make every woman look beautiful. They can be even worn upside down. The high quality materials like heavy wool and rich jersey made those pieces a long-time investments. The material movement creates the illusion that clothes follow you, not the other way round.
She values local craftsmanship therefore everything is made in Spain and one of her dreams is to start craft schools to preserve traditional methods of sewing and clothes productions. Those were passed from generation to generation. However, in the highly manufactured society, they are on the verge of extinction.
Sybilla’s Pop-Up Store, 25 Mercer Street, New York
Sybilla did not present her winter 2015 collection on any of the fashion weeks. Instead, she opted to travel with her pop-up store to various cities in the world. She wanted to be closer If you happen to be in New York City, her pop-up store is located in Noho on 25 Mercer street and her collection will be shown there until October 25th.
At the end of the Friday conversation Sybilla said that the biggest challenge for a fashion designer is being in fashion and staying happy. I think we are more and more forgetting that fashion is more than money, marketing campaigns and fashion weeks, it was created to make us happy and that was a nice reminder.
Originally published at www.stylecharmer.com.
