It was recently announced that fashion designer Peter Hidalgo, 53, died on January 17th in a homeless shelter in Manhattan. According to the reports, he was in the shelter hoping to qualify for subsidized housing.
Hidalgo, born in Santo Domingo, came from a creative family, but, while his father was a professional musician, he displayed a talent for illustration and fashion from an early age.
Selected by the fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez to enroll in a special studies course at The Altos de Chavon School of Design, an affiliate of Parsons School of Design, he earned the title of "Best Designer of the Year" from his school in 1987.
He then started creating clothes for local fashion boutiques and for private clients in the Dominican Republic where he also worked on set design for television and theater production companies.
In the 1990s he started travelling to New York and moved to Manhattan in 1994. While working as an in-house designer and designing the store windows in a West Village boutique, Hidalgo also became a well-known face in the House Ballroom Scene where Spanish-born fashion designer Miguel Adrover met him.
Eventually the two started working together and Hidalgo launched his own label when Adrover went back to Spain. Debuting in 2006, Hidalgo won the 2010 Fashion Group International's "Rising Star" award for women's wear, sharing it with Joseph Altuzarra.
He continued doing seasonal collections through 2013, but then shut his studio and mainly worked for private clients including Kanye West, Usher (he did suits for then for the 2011 MTV Music Video awards and the Grammy awards respectively) and Nicki Minaj who donned a Hidalgo gown (that looked like a modern interpretation of Dior's Tourterelle gown View this photo and betrayed Hidalgo's passion for classic fashion and Haute Couture) for the opening performance of the 2014 MTV Europe Music awards, which she also hosted.
In 2019, Hidalgo teamed with the artist David Salle and As If magazine for "The Collaboratory" project, designing a T-shirt dress, a cocktail and a strapless dress screen-printed with Salle's art that were modelled by actress Scarlett Johansson on As If.
When Adrover's infamous repurposed Burberry raincoat was featured in the "Camp: Notes on Fashion" exhibition at the Met Museum's Costume Institute, the designer and Hidalgo updated it.
Hidalgo's parable from success to homelessness brings memories of an ensemble made by his friend Miguel Adrover, who announced Hidalgo's death on his Instagram page.
Adrover was among the first designers who repurposed in a credible and fascinating way textiles and fabrics using impeccable deconstruction and reconstruction techniques that he employed to disassemble garments and make a critique of consumerism.
He flipped Burberry macs inside out (obviously drawing the ire of the company that threatened a lawsuit at the time, asking that Adrover never use their plaid patterning again...), repurposed a Louis Vuitton bag into a mini-skirt, cut a Burberry blanket and re-pieced it in what he defined "Frankenstein-style", turned an American flag into a tailored jacket and shorts, added couture ruffled tulle sleeves to a simple "I love New York" T-shirt and fashioned shoulder pads out of New York Yankees baseball caps.
One of his most famous (and infamous...) creations was a coat and skirt ensemble matched with a vintage Fendi scarf with an interlocked "F" logo print included in his A/W 2000-2001 collection. The blue and white striped cotton twill of the Victorian-style overcoat, distressed and burnt on a stove in Adrover's basement on East 3rd St, was made using a mattress ticking. The discarded mattress belonged to the late Quentin Crisp.
Adrover lived next to the English writer and actor and, after finding the mattress in the streets on a bitterly cold night covered by a thin layer of snow, he decided to rescue and salvage it and turn it into a garment to honour Quentin Crisp's memory. The designer dragged the mattress home and cut it (getting a rash from the textile as it was old and dirty...), then proceeded to create an elegant coat with it. This wasn't just a mere exercise in recycling and repurposing à la Margiela, but it had a deeply social purpose: while the tailored coat hinted at Quentin Crisp's style and the stained tickling established an intimate connection with him as a mattress is imprinted with the shape of the person who sleeps on it, with their smells and stains, becoming almost a tangible ghost of that person, the recontextualization of the textile hinted at homelessness.
By using the tickling to make a bespoke coat, Adrover attempted a comparison between middle-class, homeless, and upper-class people mixing on the sidewalks of New York City at the same time, and invited people to ponder about the dichotomy between uptown ladies and downtown ladies, at wealthy people in the latest fashion and at those people who don't own much and wear all their possessions everyday as they move around town, while also pointing at the policies on homelessness of the then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
In the '90s Giuliani proposed indeed to drastically curtail city services for the homeless, setting a limit of 90 days for stays in shelters and during his administration police conducted sweeps of parks and other public places to arrest homeless people and move them to shelters.
Adrover's collection was political, representing how people fought to survive in the streets of New York, especially the homeless. Quentin's mattress as a tailored chic coat was the answer to a world that considers not just garments, but people as disposable.
Or maybe people are more disposable than garments in the fashion industry, especially when you think about all those designers considered as geniuses one season who are then forgotten after a few years' time. Adrover's mattress overcoat together with the repurposed Burberry overcoat entered indeed the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute's permanent collection; Adrover nowadays keeps on doing his repurposing experiments in Spain, but he hasn't done a proper collection for quite a few years, while Hidalgo passed away. Maybe we should ponder more about how fashion can make or break you, and how it could still be used to make a powerful comment about society and raise social consciousness, rather than just make a single style statement.
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