Sybilla - Queen of Spanish Fashion in New York

Via Sybilla - Winter 2015 Collection

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 a bright red leather coat, black turtleneck, black pants, and sneakers. Red is a critical 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 actually 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 and inexperienced designer, as she was a part of lively  Madrid cultural scene and she inevitably approaches style in a different way than her competition. Her clothes were not loud, they were very structural, had an 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. 

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 at 25 Mercer Street, and her collection will be shown there until October 25th.

Sybilla's Pop-Up Store in Soho, October 2015

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 more and more forget that fashion is more than money, marketing campaigns and fashion weeks, it was created to make us happy and that was an excellent reminder.