They say that behind a great man, there is always a great woman. They, the great forgotten and silenced. They, the capeless heroes who took all the credit. As Virginia Woolf said: “how many women forgotten because not even they themselves could, can or will say ‘this mouth is mine'”. A famous quote that portrays the reality of many pioneers who lived even in the shadow of other women.
“My mother was always very respectful of my grandmother, she gave her all the prominence. And although she was a woman with great potential, she had the intelligence not to provoke an internal fight ”. Who supports these words is Gabriel Masfurroll, grandson of Carmen Mir -one of the most important designers in Spain during the sixties and seventies- and son of Elisa Lacambra, the woman who was always in the shadow of his mother .
Carmen Mir started in the business designing a jacket suit for a friend and ended up opening a small workshop in Manresa. She moved to Barcelona in the fifties and, by then, her daughter Elisa, who had worked as a model for her, became her right hand and the shadow that followed her everywhere. One of the firm’s great milestones was when NASA organized a parade in Houston to celebrate the landing of the first man on the moon. For the occasion, Mir designed an ad hoc model that imitated Neil Armstrong’s suit. Before, she designed the uniforms of the Spanish delegation for the Olympic Games in Mexico.
Between mother and daughter, what united them was as great as what differentiated them. “My grandmother’s clients were older women, while my mother always attracted young women. She had another way of understanding fashion, ”explains Masfurroll. There was a competition between them that stimulated her creative minds, but that did not go further because Lacambra remained in that ‘anonymity’ that she wanted to respect until the death of her parent.
“She would have ventured to create her own brand much earlier: she founded it after the death of Carmen Mir,” he stresses. Now, at ninety years old, she can boast of having fought for her dreams, having dealt with a macho society when it was not yet recognized as such, and having honored the inheritance her mother left her, even if that meant not achieving the recognition she deserved. one deserves.
Because the role of ‘right hand’, that number two or trusted person who advises and accompanies that ‘genius and figure’ is an arduous and frustrating task, no matter how passionate you are about the job. “Elisa Lacambra led the entire internationalization process of the Carmen Mir firm. My grandmother was the one who came out after the parades, but my mother was the one who led all the shows we did abroad, coming to parade in countries like Mexico”.
A feat that triples if it is contextualized in a time when the role of women was relegated to that of housewife. “Even the women who dedicated themselves to the world of women’s sewing were marginalized, since all the great couturiers were men. Although the simple fact that they worked was already very frowned upon”.
“My mother told me that every time she had to travel she needed her husband’s permission. Those were very difficult times to be a woman. Besides, she was traveling alone with her mother and a few trunks full of clothes, with no team behind her to lend a hand. They were an example of feminism when, in Spain, that word was not even recognized”.
Elisa Lacambra, a fighting woman, a feminist without knowing that she was, and with an innate talent for work that is sometimes little recognized, has managed to keep her essence alive and in force through her family. Today under the testimony of hers, her son Gabriel Masfurroll and tomorrow under that of many other women who were silenced at some point.
