When a queen wears seventeen dresses, twenty bags and "numerous" suits from the same brand, that is no longer taste - it is policy. Spain's Queen Letizia visited the Adolfo Domínguez factory in Ourense in July, in the year the Galician house turns fifty. Tiziana Domínguez, design director and granddaughter of the founder, reads it as recognition: "For years the queen has shown a firm commitment to Spanish fashion and to the creative talent of our country. I think she values a way of understanding fashion that is very present here too: timeless design, natural materials, and a defence of the initiatives that preserve the craft, the knowledge and the industry behind every garment." Read: it is no accident that the head of state dresses locally.

The story begins as a men's tailoring shop. "My grandfather was a pattern tailor and my grandmother had a refined eye for choosing fabrics. A perfect match," Tiziana says. Half a century later the brand dresses three generations of women, and its spring-summer 2027 collection, called Croma, opened Madrid Fashion Week on 14 September at the Crystal Palace in Arganzuela. The subject: what colour actually is.

That is not a rhetorical question. Tiziana runs an in-house laboratory called Ágora, where each collection starts from a single premise and three days of intensive work. This time the team sat with colorimetry scientists from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, then went into a workshop. "We started doing alchemy with Galician pigments, all of us in white lab coats, with thermometers, learning to make colour from scratch, from buckets of water, completely rudimentary," she recounts. After that the designers had a month to translate all of it into cuts.

The result is a mix of nostalgia and laboratory. One print was born from thinking about the collective memory of colour: a macro-print of everyday industrial objects, tennis balls, plastic bags, tones the brain recognises without even seeing the object, like a traffic cone. There is geometric patchwork and sequin embroidery imitating a kaleidoscope, "the first childhood game connected to colour". There are pieces assembled from scarves with magnetic fastenings that transform. And a great deal of denim, treated with inspiration from the early 2000s: "There is a heavy emphasis on denim, particularly straight or banana denim which is to die for, a completely curved silhouette that reads as sculptural."

As befits a fiftieth anniversary, Croma also contains a nod to the beginnings: tailoring details with visible construction, in honour of the founders. The materials are light and translucent - organza, taffeta and linen - in a natural palette broken by accents of lime, tangerine, olive, red and yellow.

Tiziana admits beige is the base of her own wardrobe. But she warns: "By making things cheaper and faster, you lose the print, you lose the colour, you lose the creativity." That is the sentence that explains the whole collection, and the whole problem of the industry. Fast fashion is fast because it buys its colour ready-made. Is the reader prepared to pay for colour made from a bucket of water and three days in a lab coat? Madrid Fashion Week says the queen is.