Photo: Courtesy of Sybilla
Meeting Sybilla, an Avant-Garde Designer Whose Decades-Old Dresses Look Strikingly Now
By Sarah Mower
I'm facing a dress which is as close to a miracle as I've ever seen. It's a composition of geometric and curvy black pieces, apparently held together by nothing but air. In 2022, with the desire for skin-baring cutouts sweeping fashion, this incredible piece could easily contend as a dress of the year. The only thing is that it was designed in 1991, by the brilliant, quixotic, mysterious Sybilla, the then 28-year-old woman who put Spain on the map of avant-garde fashion.
And now, finally, her work is getting a close-up viewing by a new generation at "Sybilla: The Invisible Thread," a retrospective at the Sala Canal de Isabel II in Madrid. I made the pilgrimage there for the one-off chance to meet the elusive woman whose work made such a quirkily entrancing mark in the 1980s, a young female independent designer in the then almost all-male dominated fashion scene.
"Invisible Thread"—the title most obviously refers to the technique Sybilla invented to suspend her impossible-looking floating abstracts. How did she do that? Her technique defies detection even if you press your nose up against the museum vitrine—I tried. "Well, first of all," she smiled, "I stitched them together with fishing line. Then my factory in Italy invented special ribbon which did it for me."
Sybilla was sold in American department stores and the emerging concept boutiques of the '80s and into the early '90s. When the curator Laura Cerrato Mera put out a call for owners to lend to the exhibition, women contacted her in droves; and customers who never parted with their Sybillas turned up to the private view with their daughters, who were wearing their moms' dresses.
No wonder why—Sybilla's range is astonishing, delightful, funny, and chic, and all of it completely relevant now. There are shapes with wired hems and padded curlicues; dresses which look like seed pods, runkled organic vegetables, or rocks. A fishing-net 'sea-shawl' has a haul of starfish stuck in it; a couple of flying birds cut in metal fasten a coat instead of buttons, and spiraling bra cutouts on a black dress look almost like a pair of snail shells.
Then there are her stately, caped shapes in black or splashes of cardinal red. An elegantly dynamic twist of a skirt somehow turns into a sari-like scarf draped over one shoulder. Many of her forms are simply inexplicable, and they are never explained technically in the exhibition's captions. The closest Sybilla comes to describing her ingenious drapes and geometries—some of which are convertible—is that she's "carving in cloth." As a woman who's always hated to be pigeonholed, or stereotyped, perhaps she's resisted laying all her mysteries out.
Photo: Javier Vallonrat / Courtesy of Sybilla
She claims to design almost automatically, almost unconsciously, while doodling. "While I'm on the phone," making garments that are "a joke, a wink—clothes conceived amid gales of laughter." With seriously sexy results, though, too. One famous dress was worn by the Spanish dancer and choreographer Blanca Li, in an image from 1996. Its cutouts, says Sybilla cheerfully, "symbolize all the Spanish cliches—bull's horns, the cross like Catholic religion, sun, and sex. But I didn't see that until after I'd made it."
Something about her work—besides the occasional echoes of Dali-esque surrealism or Cristobal Balenciaga, parallels the body-con and 'alternative' fashion that was going on about the same time: Jean Paul Gaultier, Azzedine Alaia, Romeo Gigli. But there never was anyone like this wild-child from Madrid who founded her business at the age of 20 in 1983, and turned up in Milan to show. "We were a big troupe of us, it was energetic and fun. We came from Spain, and it felt like a million miles away from the rest of the world. It was a special time in Madrid, when the dictatorship of Franco was over. We were young, anarchic, enthusiastic, and everything was about play and celebration."
In fact, Sybilla wasn't Spanish at all. She was born Sybilla Sarondo Mielzynska in New York in 1963, to an Argentinian father, and a Polish mother, also Sybilla, who was a fashion designer. "I came from New York when I was six years old, so I grew up in Madrid. When I was a teenager the city was waking up, with an explosion of creativity and curiosity. I identify a lot with the Spanish way of being—the celebration of friendship, improvisation, originality, spontaneity."
Photo: Juan Gatti / Courtesy of Sybilla
After her mother died when she was 14, Sybilla took life into her own hands. "I ran away from home at 16." Somewhere along the way, she managed to do an internship at Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, "where the seamstresses were all Spanish." Back in Madrid, because her young friends loved the original way she dressed, she started selling shirts at the hot nightclub El Sol. Then, she found local seamstresses "and they taught me everything." At 19, she suddenly found herself in business.
What made Sybilla's signature stand apart in the booming '80s was her way of designing with and for women, and her brilliant instinct for image-making with great photographers, Javier Vallhonrat in particular.
"My method is mostly working with fabric directly on the body. What I create is very influenced by my experiences as a woman, and by the women close to me. I try to do clothes that give joy, strength, peace, make you shine or disappear, depending on the moment. Pieces that are like good friends you can count on and stay with you for many years." But as far as she was concerned, "the piece is born when it's photographed. Then it's a reality."
The rollercoaster years found Sybilla first with a Spanish manufacturer, then an Italian, and then, Japanese partners. The crazy pace, and the birth of two children began to change her mind about what she really wanted. She was an early spotter of the toll that the industry was taking, both on people and on the environment. "I started meeting many of the most important designers and I saw that the majority were unhappy and overwhelmed, and many struggling even if they had big success," she remembers. "And I had started a parallel life doing ecological projects in Majorca. I wanted to reinvent my life in a different way."
So she has. Today, Sybilla has a custom bridal studio in Madrid, and lives in Majorca on a regenerative farm where she has founded a school that teaches on that subject. As with everything else she's done, she's still well ahead of her time.
"Sybilla: The Invisible Thread," runs until January 15, 2023 at the Sala Canal de Isabel II in Madrid.
Sybilla in her studio.Photo: Felix Valiente / Courtesy of Sybilla
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