The Highlights From 080 Barcelona Fashion Week

Adolfo Dominguez

Spain may not have the biggest fashion industry in the world, but boy, does it do major fashion dynasties in a big way: Zara, with the Ortega family; Mango, with the Andic family; and, of course, Adolfo Dominguez, the fashion label founded by the Dominguezs in 1950 as a tailoring company before it became a designer brand in 1976, just as General Franco died and his fascist regime came to an end. The three-generation spanning Adolfo Dominguez label flourished as Spain came out of those dark decades, emerging amidst a rapidly transforming country. I remember it from the 1980s: You’d see the label’s soft, easy, artfully crumpled tailoring in British Vogue or in The Face, and you also saw it on Don Johnson’s Crockett in Miami Vice as he battled it out with Uzi-toting drug lords, smooched with Sheena Easton, and tangled with Eartha Kitt as a voodoo high priestess. (The last pure wonderful high camp: No notes.)

Dominguez was doing slow fashion before just about anyone else, something which was much to the fore in its 50th anniversary co-ed show, held at the end of the first day of the 080 Barcelona Fashion schedule, where Dominguez himself was honored by Jaume Collboni, the Mayor of Barcelona, and the Minister for the Presidency, Albert Damau.

The clothes were pretty good, because they looked real and made sense, and were done with a quiet conviction, echoing what I noticed to be an enviably undone attitude among Barcelona’s most stylish residents. The collection is designed by creative director Tiziana Dominguez, daughter of Adolfo, while her sister Adriana Dominguez is the brand’s executive president. (“We keep everything in the family—like Succession,” Adriana quipped just before the show started.) Tiziana leaned into soft, slouchy jackets and shirts, cut to collapse as they draped. These she layered with artisanal knits or asymmetric skirts with thread-like fringing that gently moved as the models walked—walking, incidentally, in some terrific soft loafer-slippers, outsized panels of leather sitting on top of the shoes, matching the artfully louche and easy spirit of the collection. Meanwhile, the casting made me think of the brand’s ’80s mantra, Wrinkles are beautiful. They were talking about the clothes back then, but there were some elegantly haggard guys on the runway who also reflected that statement—something to give me hope.

Txell Miras. Photo: Courtesy of Barcelona Fashion Week

Txell Miras

Though I had no clue what to expect from Txell Miras, I rather liked her collection with its clean, linear layers of wool, cotton poplin, neoprene, knit, and jersey in beige, greige, and gray. On sleeveless coats with high shoulder-lines, soft narrow skirts, and blousons with attenuated sleeves, the only decoration was the line drawings of copulating couples, working their way through all manner of positions. (Maybe too many positions, I lost count at the 60th look.)