Queen Sofía has spent fifty years spending her summers at the Marivent residence, where the then princes Juan Carlos and Sofía entered for the first time on August 4, 1973. During her stays in Mallorca, the King's mother chooses comfortable outfits and, in In recent years, she has chosen to wear sets of wide pants and a printed blouse, but last Saturday, for the family dinner that took place in a restaurant in Portixol, Queen Sofía wore a long white dress with red print motifs and blue that surprised.
It was not a casual choice since it is a model from the Valeria Cotoner collection, a firm behind which is the designer Valeria Castillejo, great-granddaughter of Nicolás Cotoner, Marquis of Mondéjar, head of the Casa del Rey between 1975 and 1990. and the person in charge of which the royal family chose Majorca to spend their holidays. The designer's garments are also distributed in a logistics center that employs disabled people.
Valeria Castillejo chose Valeria Cotoner as her trade name, precisely as a tribute to her family, originally from Mallorca (her maternal grandmother was the daughter of the Marquis of Mondéjar) and also because Cotoner refers to cotton (cotó, in Catalan and cotton, in English) a material with the one who makes most of his designs. The designer currently lives in New York and her clothes are sold online and in different multi-brand stores in Spain, including El Corte Inglés. Following in the footsteps of her grandmother, founder of the floral art shop Akilea in Madrid, Valeria Castillejo, who went to study in New York, set up the Bleeker Flowers Shop florist in the city of skyscrapers, with which she ended up accessing the best houses in New York and the Hamptons.
In 2020, as a result of the pandemic, the flower business was paralyzed and with the fabrics she saved from her travels she began to make dresses and created her firm Valeria Cotoner, which she now combines with some floral art commissions. The cotton fabrics come from India, are sewn in Galicia and Italy, and are distributed through a logistics center belonging to the Aprocor Foundation, which employs disabled people.
