Coinciding with the start of the winter sales, I went for a stroll through the clothing stores in the city center; more out of tradition than out of desire or need to buy. I went shopping like someone who goes to the Santa Llúcia Fair every year and doesn't even buy a sad caganer. Perhaps for this reason, because I wasn't looking for anything specific and was rather lazy to look at prices and sizes, I dedicated myself to analyzing the shop windows from, let's say, an anthropological point of view. As anyone who reviews my Instagram can attest, I am not an expert in fashion or trends, but I have the feeling that this season's clothes are terribly boring. Why do we dress in such a sad way? Perhaps because the pandemic has frozen our hearts and our joy of living, or because thanks to the intense Greta Thunberg we have finally realized that we are heading towards extinction... Perhaps all of this has a much more prosaic explanation: we have turned Marie Kondo into our minimalist guru and at home, only MUJI clothes enter: comfortable and quality, but lacking joy. The fact is that looking at the sad shop windows of this 2022, the explosion of colors that Custo Dalmau caused on a planetary scale more than twenty years ago with his brightly colored printed t-shirts made in Barcelona came to mind.
The history of Custo Barcelona actually begins in the 80s when brothers Custo and David Dalmau started designing clothes. The boom of their creations would occur about twenty years later. In 1997, they landed in the United States where their brand, Custo Barcelona, was invited to New York Fashion Week and there their famous t-shirts became a huge hit. Characters from successful series of the time like Sex and the City or Friends fell in love with Custo Barcelona t-shirts and wore them on and off screen. The great Julia Roberts appeared with one of their creations in Runaway Bride, one of her greatest successes of all time, and decisively contributed to the international takeoff of the Dalmau brothers. The New York Times came up with a name for this phenomenon: Customania.
I perfectly remember the opening of the first Custo store in Barcelona. It was the year 2001 and when we referred to something modern, stylish or great, we said it was fashion. Therefore, twenty years ago Custo Barcelona t-shirts were the most fashion. Thanks to the Dalmau brothers or because of them, many Barcelonians temporarily parked our classic and bland Fruit of the Loom t-shirts, preferably black, white and gray, and dared to wear Custo Barcelona's striking prints. I believe Custo was a pioneer and very brave precisely in that: introducing prints into men's fashion ---until then, practically, confined to the classic Hawaiian shirt---. Or, put another way, thanks to Custo Barcelona, the man of the early 21st century dared to go out on the street with a striking t-shirt without feeling like he was in costume or that he was tacky.
I believe Custo was a pioneer and very brave precisely in that: introducing prints into men's fashion, until then, practically, confined to the classic Hawaiian shirtI believe Custo Barcelona t-shirts had a lot of that Barcelona from twenty years ago. A charming, optimistic, cheerful, and vibrant city.A successful mix of the good vibes of Californian beaches with the chaotic authenticity of Naples and the tolerant and civic Europeanism of Amsterdam. A Barcelona that, of course, had problems (housing, environmental pollution, crime hotspots, gentrification...), but where Barcelonans did not always seem angry. Without the current fatalism.
I start this third pandemic year with an inevitably nostalgic look back at that era of the Custo Barcelona boom. Remembering those light years, full of color and daring, a devastating phrase pronounced by Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) at the end of Don't Look Up comes to mind (in the middle of the last supper, just a few minutes before a meteorite devastates the planet): "We really had everything, didn't we?".