New York fashion designer Miguel Adrover just showed his first collection in eight years, which is called (without irony) Out of My Mind. Each garment is crafted from things he found in his own closet. Adrover took his old t-shirts, sports jerseys, suit trousers, beach towels, and stuffed cats, and trimmed, tailored and recombined them into pieces with an arresting, punkish, and vaguely Medieval sensibility. Sometimes you have to look hard to recognize the original pieces. Even when it’s obvious what Adrover is up to (turning a jacket into a skirt, wearing a keffiyeh as a collar) the clothes are never gimmicky — their cut and silhouettes make drama. If a lady walked into a restaurant wearing one of these outfits, you would look up from your goat cheese salad, and away from your conversation, to get a better look.
Textile mills have used reclaimed materials in their textiles before. Retailers have sold organic fashion lines before. And designers like XULY.Bet have made used clothing into high fashion. What makes Adrover’s project unique, aside from its very particularly, piquant artistry, is his impassioned refusal of material. As an amateur dressmaker I know that sewing virtually any garment creates waste: there’s more yardage purchased than is needed, unusable lengths at the end of the bolts, and scraps left over after cutting. And there’s the endless waste of fashion itself, which proscribes new looks to buy and wear each season when our closets are already teeming. The entire industry is driven by perpetual newness and Adrover is putting the brakes on it, confusing cycles of production. The only way these clothes can be sold is as one-off pieces, like sculpture. If, say, Barneys orders a quantity of pieces, then each one, sourced from different existing garments, will be an entirely different, unpredictable thing. Adrover’s project calls us look again at clothes we set aside because they’re worn, stained, out of style, and just plain old. It’s highly refined fashion, and a highly refined political position too.