“We have been here for a month,” says Alma Aguilar (Madrid, 1976) as she closes the door of the two-story chalet in the La Moraleja urbanization where she lives with her family. “I was looking for a home where I could have my studio to work without having the feeling of being at home.”
That studio that I imagined occupies half of the ground floor, a two-story space with windows overlooking the garden and where these days she receives her sewing clients. “I've stuck with my favorite way of working,” she says. Because Alma Aguilar has not always worked here, nor has she done it this way.
Graduated in fashion design in the late nineties, in '98 she was already thinking about what form her brand would take. “There was a part of me that helped me make it work, which was that I thought that if it didn't work, nothing would happen,” she remembers about those days. When she opened her first store she was 24 years old (“she arrived with the dressmakers at eight in the morning and left with the last saleswoman at 8:30 p.m.”) and a year later, in 2001, she went up to the then known as Cibeles Footbridge.
In 2013, in the final stretch of her second pregnancy, she decided to stop parading. “I found myself thinking, 'I hope Angie gets a little ahead of me, so I have time to get to the September show.' She didn't make sense. The collections come and go, but mother was not going to be more. Allegra (her first daughter) was already eight years old, I was 36… I didn't want to face motherhood in the same way. It was difficult for me to make the decision, to understand what I wanted beyond the concern of whether she was going to parade again or whether someone was going to take my place.”
It was the first change of direction in his career, and although he kept the store. “The heart of the brand is the point of sale and we started making custom things for clients. I always had the seamstresses either making alterations - which is undervaluing them - or working on the show. What I like about my job is the craftsmanship, and the bigger you get, the harder it is not to get away from that.”
She also began a period as a teacher that helped her “reconnect with the most exciting part” of fashion. Closing doors, in addition, always implies opening windows. For Alma Aguilar there were two challenges as creative director, first of Intropia and then of the Ecoalf women's line.
At the beginning of 2020 he decided to refocus on his own brand, and while he was drawing that new beginning, the pandemic arrived. “When a brand bears your name, it evolves with you. I thought even more about how to get back to Alma Aguilar. I have always been lucky to have a team of clothing artisans working side by side with me. That gives me tools and a very beautiful and profound ability to understand what I do.”
The firm today responds to a tailored fashion model, but there are things that have not changed: “I continue to identify with my product. I love being told 'Those are your sleeves' or that my clothes are timeless. There is a part of me that is bohemian. It is in me and in my work too.”
The designer brings her daughters along throughout the conversation. Allegra, 21, studies Fashion Communication and Image and Angela (or Angie), 12, “is very free and intuitive.” She has also learned to understand herself through her questions: “It was difficult for them to understand why I don't wear my brand. Saving the distance, it is as if a painter paints a painting for a wall that he has bare at home. For me, clothes don't particularly interest me. It makes me suffer to think about what I should wear. I like to think about it for others. “I like making clothes, but not wearing them.”
Despite the tightness of his schedule and the recognition that “in this job you never stop working,” he does not always follow the same schedule: “I'm not one for routines, I don't like them. I feel better when I do things without feeling obligated. Then I look back and think: I have always had obligations and I still have them! I am responsible, although if I feel obligated to do something, I block myself.” The same thing happens to her when they tell her what she has to do: “I get upset a lot,” she says, laughing. He is a free soul.
