When people tell her she is the most important Spanish designer since Balenciaga, Sybilla Sorondo answers with a sentence that says everything about her: „That is a big compliment and it is probably too big for me.” The first instinct is to think it is false modesty. After a few minutes it becomes clear the issue is something else - she simply cannot talk about her work in the singular. Instead of „I”, she keeps saying „we”.

Winner of the National Fashion Award in 2015, Sybilla now has an exhibition at the „Plaza del Gato” gallery in Madrid, open until 19 September 2026. It is not an exhibition of clothes but of photographs - a deliberate choice, because many of her pieces were never photographed in their own time and simply vanished. What survived, survived through images. The curator is Agustina Covian, her sister in spirit as she puts it, who had to take a step back to summarise a body of work its author cannot see from the outside.

Sybilla was the face of Madrid's creative ferment in the eighties. Her first creations were photographed by Miguel Oriola and Pepe Lamarca in black and white, where the models looked like creatures in motion. Towards the end of the eighties, working with Juan Gatti and Javier Vallhonrat, her aesthetic shifted - more fantasy, more colour, new shapes for the female body that Spain had not seen before. Vallhonrat says it from his side: he worked with John Galliano and Christian Lacroix and created memorable images, but the ones with Sybilla, he says, have the strongest character of singularity.

„I am a product of an era of this country”, the designer says. It is a modest sentence that is in fact an accurate analysis - her success in Italy and Japan was not an individual feat but the emergence of a whole generation that woke up at the same time.

The most interesting part of the interview is not about the past. Sybilla twice had to shut the business over financial problems, and that is exactly why her diagnosis of today's fashion industry carries not a trace of nostalgia: „There are not many brands left where the designer is the owner and can make important decisions. The demand is that nobody should ever be irreplaceable, and that often makes brands lose their personality.” Read that sentence again and replace the word „brand” with any industry you know.

There is also a piece of news that gave her more joy than dressing actresses and singers: that Jocomomola, her younger line from the nineties, is now being resold on second-hand clothing apps. „I realise that, contrary to what people think, the young appreciate a good cut, they get excited by fabrics and colours, they value craftsmanship and things outside the ordinary. There is fashion culture and curiosity.” So a piece from the nineties is being paid for again - not because of marketing, but because it lasted.

On artificial intelligence she has a view that is unexpectedly precise for someone of her generation: machine learning models are developed only from objects and ideas that already exist. If we want to make something genuinely new, she says, we need to practise „being human” - going out to look for new impulses, the kind only real life and another person's gaze can give you.

The gallery, which she co-founded with the architect Andres Serra, exists to give visibility to artists who never received the recognition they deserve. It is hard not to notice that this now applies to her as well.