Alberto Dugarte is one of the people who knows the most secrets about well-known Spanish faces. Always in the shadows, as a faithful companion and doing what he loved since he was a child: creating style and enhancing beauty in others.
He defines himself as a dreamer, but one of those who for a long time had to imprison his desires because the path he had chosen was not the one that his environment and society wanted for him. And Alberto, with hardly any references in the fight, believed the story that he couldn’t be different and it wasn’t worth fighting for what he felt.
The 37-year-old stylist’s story is undoubtedly inspiring, perhaps for this reason, now that he has traveled the path he would never have imagined, he uses his social networks to raise awareness. Dugarte was this weekend at the Expo Beauty Barcelona contest where he was awarded a prize for some of his creations. There he receives this medium to talk about his personal and professional career, and that celebrity stylist label that he willingly accepts: “It’s a reality and I think it’s even nice that they know me for it.”
Dugarte is one of the greatest exponents of the styling sector within television programs where he has contributed his experience in spaces such as Idol Kids or Got talent, to give two examples. Her pace of life is hectic, she confesses that she works every day and sleeps little, and that the key to her family reconciliation is that she can do it with her partner, who is an aesthetic doctor: “It is much easier to combine everything because we have the same frenetic pace. I love what I do and it is easy for me to do it 24 hours a day”.
Getting this far has not been easy for Alberto who, as a child, was distracted by making costume creations with paper napkins in a restaurant while the other children went out to play soccer or play sports. He also tried with more or less success doing hairstyles for his parents’ friends, with the occasional mishap like when the brush got tangled and he couldn’t get it out. Seeing all this, his mother decided to enroll him in an oil painting course at the age of eight.
And then the void came: “There was a stage of about nine years where I was very afraid to do what I liked because they pointed out to me for being a sissy from the town and I, who was unaware of the whole universe, hid it so as not to disappoint my family. My father had a very strict upbringing and at that time it was complicated, ”he explains.
He went to Tenerife where he worked in various trades such as advertising delivery man, window dresser or waiter. Until he hit the table: “The most important thing was to accept myself, from that everything flowed.” He went to Madrid where he also went through a difficult period, with hard economic times in which he only had a can of tuna and some spaghetti to eat, but when his mother called him, he lied and told him that everything was fine. .
She contacted makeup and styling and realized that there was a world beyond weddings. “Beauty is my happiness and that of others. I don’t like to dress up people, but to enhance their beauty”, she says. This is how he has accumulated a portfolio of public figures who trust him, such as Isabel Pantoja, Ana Obregón, Jorge Javier Vázquez or a Georgina with whom he worked in the first season of his series and whom he defines as “a very, very close person ”.
Now he uses his Instagram not only to make his creations visible, but to eliminate fears in others and be a light for others, that light that he never had when he was little and that forced him to take refuge in the shadows. He is now a permanent focus.
