Inside a labyrinthine white, functional building without logos in an industrial estate in Ourense, is the Adolfo Domínguez empire. Penetrating this exclusive world is a journey into our most recent history, the one that has been written to the rhythm of the slogan “The wrinkle is beautiful”, a phrase that symbolized a change in the way of dressing that definitively left behind the gray suits of the Francoism.
Practically the entire management and production staff of the firm is concentrated in this place, people dressed from head to toe in the clothes they produce and converted into models that demonstrate the maxims of made in AD design: functionality is not incompatible with elegance. and modernity.
It is listed on the stock market and, four decades after its founding, it is already a large fashion brand with 347 points of sale in 22 countries, but it maintains the beautiful pulse of companies that do not want to stop being a little familiar. Despite the air of industry, one still breathes the halo of one of the designer's first memories: his grandmother spinning flax.
Adolfo and his daughter Adriana sit next to each other. The resemblance between them is astonishing. The same calm in their enormous eyes and the same restless attitude towards everything that surrounds them, interrupting each other with infinite affection, asking each other things, offering each other the fruit they have brought as a snack. They call everyone they meet by their first name and congratulate one of the seamstresses who has just had her birthday with a sincere hug. The designer walks around the factory with the air of a happy retiree.
“Adolfo, did you want to rest?” I ask him, although I know that, in reality, he is working hard on his second novel, a continuation of that Juan Griego published for the first time in 1992. He is immersed in reading the history of Spain in imperial times and writes, by hand, for hours. He says that, for him, what he does now is as important as even what he did in the past, referring to design. “I have enormous joy for being able to live in the present and dedicate myself to reading and writing. Writing is fixing the present, and it is an absolute gift that makes me happy. Writing is putting order, understanding.”
The wrinkle is still beautiful for him, although in a different way. The beginnings of his dream are left behind, and with the beautiful wrinkles also installed on his face, Adolfo Domínguez has long since given way to his first-born Adriana. He now observes from that calm and literary retreat how his brand resists the attacks of time and the economy after having become the standard bearer of sustainable fashion in Spain.
A walk through the factory is enough to realize the spirit that characterizes today this company that has known how to modernize in the same way that it knew how to dialogue in the eighties with that Spain of transition. Everything seems symbolic in this place: a half-open door behind which we see a meeting with a Chinese delegation; a set where photos are being taken for a campaign; everywhere, neon advertisements on the walls with motivational phrases taken from the latest slogans, and photos of philosophers who have become models with whom AD has shown that fashion must also be used to think.
Their difficulties have been of biblical dimensions: first a fire, then a takeover bid and, finally, a pandemic. How do they manage to resist so much? Adriana Domínguez, from his calm audacity, seems to have analyzed it many times: it is not that Adolfo Domínguez was a phenomenon of transition, but that, at that moment, he managed to represent his time because it was timeless. “His truths about him are true then, now, tomorrow and always,” she insists.
For her, time puts everyone in their place and validates things. “We are a brand that was born in the eighties to dress an era, but the truth is that my father, like any artist, declined in his time. The talent then was in the vocation for durability, and that is what we aim for today as well: we want to design garments that people do not want to throw away.”
When the concept of sustainability was not even talked about, Adolfo Domínguez already claimed to be an environmentalist. He discovered ecology as an ideology in 1968 in France, where he went to study at the Paris VIII-Vincennes University and discovered all those leftist currents that turned '68 into a progressive icon. “People were fascinated by the Maoists,” he says, “but I became fascinated with two things: Guy Debord's Situationists, and the environmentalists, perhaps because my childhood landscape was the Sil canyons.”
When he returned to Galicia, applying those ideas, he realized that linen was more sustainable than cotton, and that, furthermore, it was an old acquaintance of the spinners like his grandmother. That's why today he continues to be a star of the company.
“Viscose was a poor thing, but I introduced it because it was more sustainable, coming from a tree,” he continues. “And since animal fur is an ethical disgrace, I opted, with great difficulty, for synthetic fur.” The designer insists that, as the manager of a 21st century company, it is up to his daughter to do sustainability based on science, but at the time, there was no science to help him with his ecological objective: “We only had pure common sense , and an ethical conviction, which is what environmentalism is.”
Probably, thanks to that hotbed of ideas that was Paris in '68, Adolfo Domínguez did not give up on a challenge that would later become his main artistic objective: through clothing, he felt the need to express the changes in thought. of the Spain of the transition. But how do you maintain a goal of this magnitude when there is no longer a transition to portray? The challenge, therefore, cannot be so historical and creative for Adriana Domínguez, who has set out to rescue the philosophical background from all that.
It is no coincidence: a worthy daughter of her father, Adriana is passionate (and very knowledgeable) about philosophy, who reads tirelessly. “Sustainability is the great challenge of our generation,” she says, referring to the two of us, not her father. “If Adolfo achieved a dialogue with his society from ethics, that has to continue to be possible today. The great advantage of fashion brands is that they know how to do just that: make things fashionable, so what I set out to do through our firm is to make certain ideas fashionable. We are daring to do what he did in the eighties. How about we establish a dialogue with society from our position as a fashion brand? There, of course, is sustainability as a value.”
In the window of their store at Serrano, 5, Madrid, they have put up a huge vinyl that Adriana defines as “very much my father” because it says Let's be activists of the eternal. It makes you think about applying eternity to fashion. Does thinking sustainably make this textile industry—the most polluting in the world—more bearable? Have they really managed to build their own story in the market with the simple proposal of thinking before dressing?
Adriana Domínguez points out to us the absurdity of using and throwing away what has just been released, and once again appeals to a concept that, a while ago, her father left up in the air: “It means having very little common sense, don't you think? ?” They seem to have it clear since the eighties: common sense is the logic that hides in important decisions such as what to design, what to sell and, on the other side of the chain, what to buy.
Then her father interrupts her. “Look at it both: there is nothing more sustainable than being a writer. We stay still, we don't spend things. “I'm cheap!” she exclaims just before evoking the beauty of picking blackberries and eating them outdoors. With her announcement, she reminded us that she is someone who has always lived in that mental sustainability that Adriana Domínguez also believes in and that she has tried to transfer to her company's business model, that of the small personal gestures of people like her, who has a garden, does not use nail polish and has spread a manifesto on all the walls of the factory: "We think that fashion is not important, but clothes are."
“We dress so that they love us,” says Adolfo, “and we have to understand that clothes are our second skin: how are we going to throw them away?”
Indeed, people say that they have nothing to wear despite having hundreds of things in the closet, but they are hundreds of things that are already old, that have been designed not to last, contrary to that common sense prior to the fever of brand new items. : “Do you remember how they dressed you when you were little?” Adriana rebukes me. Of course I remember that: we had few clothes, but they were magnificently made, and the distinction was in the textile: fabrics that did not wear out in the areas of friction, wool that did not pill, clothes that simply became too small because the ones we changed were we.
The CEO of Adolfo Domínguez brings me out of my reverie with one of her lapidary phrases: “Our 'Be older' is nothing other than pure common sense.”
As we progress in our conversation, I can't stop thinking about the nuance of all this: this consumer society of ours has made it so that the most ethical is often the most expensive. There may be those who have not understood that it is worth the investment of money that goes for what is good and long-lasting. Or even more so: it is possible that there is an entire generation inheriting the crisis and precariousness, probably the most aware of the ethics of sustainability, whose purchasing power does not allow militancy in that highly desirable common sense. How to combine all that?
For Adriana Domínguez, deep down, it is an artistic challenge: “We have to try to make everything look different, because what is sustainable is more durable, so it is actually cheaper since, in the long run, you buy less.” According to her, society, seduced by companies that sell quick change and new things, does not see the deception, but it is really more logical to have fewer things that you use more. It would be necessary, as Adolfo indicates, to redirect ourselves to a culture of buying less and better because, "if you think about it, this mass consumption is a recent degeneration of history that was born, in reality, after the Second World War." Indeed: before people were not dying to accumulate things, I tell you. And Adriana completes my sentence: “We will have to correct it.”
But deep down, his father is an optimist who deeply believes in the capacity of education as the great asset of a country, and is quick to tell us that everything will correct itself: “Human beings are intelligent enough to get out of from any quagmire thanks to science,” he says. For Adriana, on the other hand, responsibility has three vertices: political agents, companies and consumers, and none of the three has the autonomous capacity to resolve this quagmire in which the planet has gotten itself.
“Many times people speak in a paternalistic way, indicating that this is resolved by governments, and that is not the case. I believe a lot in individual responsibility, educating ourselves and learning. In fact, the younger generations are more educated, but they are also the ones that consume brands like Shein the most, which is the worst.”
In line with that optimistic glow of Adolfo, I wonder if, in fact, the changes and discourses that we have been establishing in recent years will not go along that collective and intelligent path to get out of the quagmire. Are the youth movements against climate change, led by Greta Thunberg, not already an unstoppable reaction? Isn't feminism much more sustainable as an egalitarian proposal?
It is known that Adriana Domínguez has made an important commitment to parity in the company's management positions and to conciliation in the design and management divisions, something that she, modestly, attributes to the way in which her father He has educated his three daughters and has been educated himself. But in practice, AD is a company with a fundamentally female base, as is usual in the textile industry, and whose management is equal, something that is no longer so common. For her, even so, it has been a natural process in which internal talent has been allowed to emerge, which was obviously female due to the number of workers that the staff itself contained.
“What there was in my gaze, being the boss, was an absence of prejudice: it's not that I was in favor, it's that I had nothing against it!” What is there, besides intentions, in that look? A conviction in that boss about a way of being in women that fosters a more cooperative and horizontal culture, something that is noticeable when it is established as a company culture.
Has that company culture been the secret to making necessity a virtue in the pandemic? I ask you. Both of their faces darken and their tendency to elaborate speech and precise words disappears: only exclamations of disaster emerge. Terrible, is all they manage to say. The flow of income was radically cut off by having to close 96% of the stores and gradually reopen, since not all countries have normalized at the same pace. But Adriana Domínguez speaks in the past tense about the pandemic and shows that she has inherited part of her father's prudent optimism. “I tried to see something positive in that: when they give you lemons, make lemonade; so we try to take advantage of that period of time to become more efficient. It was a very unpleasant moment in every way, but I would like to think that it has improved us.”
Mentioning the pandemic, curiously, is always that moment in which we end up talking about the future, a future in which we hope not only for the novel that Adolfo Domínguez is writing, but for a documentary about the figure of the designer that is in the editing phase. When talking about the film, Adriana looks at her father with affection and, recognizing that it is her idea, she comments on it with the utmost respect. She “Reflects him a lot, but she doesn't just talk about him. It is a focus on what a person is like who, leaving one of the poorest and most remote areas of Spain, is capable of seeing opportunities where others would not see them and leaving us a collective legacy. It is a story of creativity and an inspiration for young people.”
Sounds good. It sounds, like everything within these walls, like a skillful combination of art, intelligence and fashion that tries to be relevant and necessary for the world from this corner of Ourense, where Adolfo Domínguez reminds us that, in the DNA of the brand, the idea that “dressing is a poetic task.” Therein lies what his daughter hopes for the future while he finishes his novel: “I wish they love us because we provide what is most needed at this moment: a more sustainable product with a process of our own creativity.”
