He was one of the great voices in the history of contemporary Spanish fashion, a transgressive and complex designer of hugely demanding artistic work, characterized by androgynous designs that blurred the line of fashion genres. David Delfín left us all too soon: a brain tumour took him at age 46 in 2017, leaving Spanish fashion orphaned.
The designer from Malaga represented, like no other, the emergence of a new generation of young designers who arrived with the millennium, and who conceived of fashion in an interdisciplinary way. David made his project David Delfín with the Gorka brothers, Diego and Deborah Postigo, and his muse and friend Bimba Bosé-, a creative platform in which different forms of artistic expression coexisted, such as photography, performance, video , music and fashion.
Now David Delfín has entered the museum and does so in 2020 when the Malaga designer would have turned 50 and would have celebrated 20 years since his first collection. Without doubt these are round numbers. The exhibition, which becomes his first major retrospective, features the key artistic ideas of David Delfín via more than 60 pieces and can be visited in the Sala Canal de Isabel II in Madrid.
A tribute to the designer from Malaga
The exhibition, curated by Raúl Marina, covers David Delfín’s creative career, starting from Sans Titre (1999), his first collection not planned as such, but as a pictorial exercise in search of new support. It also includes the controversial Cour des Miracles (Spring-Summer 2003), a collection that set the Madrid catwalk alight by presenting models with shaved heads and some with nooses around their neck, a creation which was misunderstood and dealt a hard blow and some revulsion towards the continued defence of his creative universe.
His career is reviewed through 60 of the most iconic pieces ordered chronologically, revealing the freshness, the contemporary nature and the singular hallmark of this charismatic designer from Malaga: dresses with bandages, ant embroidery, cross stitch hearts or military jackets. The calligraphy of David Delfín was also singular: he wrote with his left hand, the useless hand he wanted to turn into something useful. In fact, all of his creations are rooted in his references, his ideas and emotions about fusing fashion with art, from psychoanalysis to the exploration of perversion and duality via the cinema of Luis Buñuel, the surrealist movements or René Magritte’s paintings.
For this reason, in order to explore the entire universe of the charismatic designer, photographs, videos, writings and various archive materials, both personal and work, have been included in the exhibition. It seeks to present a global vision of David Delfín, enabling us to understand how these ideas were embodied in the garments via his influences, his unmistakable style, chromatic range and care in pattern-making.
The exhibition will be open to the public until 10th May.
