Spanish Fliers

Last year it was Barcelona. This year it's Madrid. Watch the new talent take off.-Olé!

adrid's jumping dusk-till-dawn set should be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but isn't; the sparkly denizens of Europe's burgeoning fashion and nightlife capital have never been more radiant. Permanent fixtures on the glittering club circuit are screen actress Bibi Andersen, now Madrid's favorite transsexual chat-show host(ess), and Rossy de Palma, a star of Pedro Almodovar's hit film and proprietress of her own tiny hot spot, Nairobi. But as Lisa Lovatt-Smith, Vogue Espaha's twenty-one-year-old fashion director, observes, sleepless nights are almost painless with the famous two-hour-plus Spanish siesta. That's the key to serenity in a city where after hours aren't.

A star of Madrid's brimming cultural pack is twentynine-yearold painter Sigfrido Martin Begue, who, particular about sartorial details, always paints his majas dressed in Balenciaga, Spain's legendary couturier, or Sybilla, the reclusive design genius whose recent success has put Madrid on Europe's fashion map (she also hangs one of Sigfrido's canvases in her studio). Other fashionable talent in town is the pixieish design duo of Luis Devota and Modesto Lomba. The combination of Argentinean-born Devota's quixotic designs and Lomba's prosaic experience as a tailor has sparked off four sweet but unfrilly collections, as well as a nomination for the Balenciaga Award, which, as you might have guessed, Sybilla won last year.

CHRISTA D'SOUZA