This week we continue our look at Spanish influence on the world of designer fashion. Since 1997, the Custo Barcelona label has been a regular at New York Fashion Week and on catwalks around the world. The man behind the brand is Custo Dalmau, born Ángel Custodio Dalmau Salmón in Tremp, Lleida, Catalonia, in 1959.

Custo grew up in Barcelona and studied architecture, which may seem an unusual subject for a fashion designer, but it would go on to help inspire the complex graphic prints and textured textiles for which his label is so renowned. His brother David undertook a less surprising course of study in the Arts and together the two formed the Custo Line label in 1980. They started out by producing printed T-shirts which were an expression of their interest in graphic design and quickly found success with their unique creations – and so the Custo signature was born. Custo designs have since gone on to feature in hugely successful TV series such as Friends and Sex and the City and are worn by celebrities including Julia Roberts, Antonio Banderas and Charlize Theron.

Custo has appeared on numerous Spanish language TV shows and has done much in his years in the forefront of the fashion world to promote Spain and his local area in particular. He was recently awarded the prize for ‘Lo emprenedor’ (The Entrepreneur) by the Lleida province tourist board in recognition of his services in raising awareness of the area around the world.

The fashion world last week mourned the loss of Oscar de la Renta, one of the best known designers of the Spanish-speaking world,  who died on 20 October at the age of 82 after a long battle with cancer.

He was born in 1932 in the Dominican Republic, leaving at the age of 18 to study painting in Madrid. To earn some extra money, he sketched clothes for newspapers and fashion houses and thus developed a love of fashion design. His sketches soon drew media attention and led to an apprenticeship with celebrated couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga.

The rest, as they say, is history. He was catapulted to worldwide acclaim in the 1960s when his designs were favoured by then first lady Jackie Kennedy, and he continued to dress first ladies of the United States right up to Michelle Obama. His designs have also adorned various Hollywood A-listers, and his final commission was to design Amal Alamuddin’s gown for her recent wedding to George Clooney.

De la Rentareceived many accolades, and not only for his contribution to the fashion industry. He received the highest honour of the Dominican Republic, the Order of Merit of Duarte, Sánchez and Mella, and served as the country’s Ambassador-at-Large; he was awarded France’s Légiond’honneur; King Juan Carlos of Spain conferred upon him the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts (Medalla de Oro al mérito en las Bellas Artes) and La Gran Cruz de la Orden del Mérito Civil (The Order of Civil Merit), and he also served as chairman of the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, which promotes Spanish tuition in the US as well as other aspects of Spanish language and culture.

Oscar de la Rentawill be immortalised by his designs and remembered for his philanthropic work. He will be sadly missed.

Every language has its variations from region to region – English being perhaps one of the prime examples with vastly differing accents up and down the British Isles and indeed around the world. Spanish too, is spoken in many countries and, despite the work of the Royal Spanish Academy to standardise the language, it has its own variations from one country to the next. Nowhere are these differences more marked than in Argentina.

In a previous blog, we looked at the use of Vos in Argentina but there are other significant differences in the way Argentinians speak which set them apart from their Spanish counterparts and even their Latin American neighbours.

The most notable of these differences is the way the ‘y’ sound is pronounced. If you’ve taken a Spanish language course (or even if you haven’t!) you probably already know that usually this sounds like the English letter ‘e’. So the word yo (meaning ‘I’) sounds like ‘ee-oh’. The double L (as in paella or tortilla) also has the same sound in most Spanish-speaking countries. Not so in Argentina, where it has a ‘sh’ sound, so yo becomes ‘sho-oh’, lluvia (meaning rain) instead of the usual pronunciation of ‘ee-uh-via’ becomes ‘sh-uh-via’ and so on.

Argentinian Spanish lacks the lisp of mainland Spain, tends to be spoken at a faster pace and has lots of slang words. One of the most common you will hear is ‘Che’ (as in Guevara – so nicknamed because he was born in Argentina) which means something like ‘hey’, but there are lots of other words which are particular to Argentina. Want to order a beer? Don’t ask for cerveza but birra. If you intend to visit Argentina and practise your Spanish, listen carefully for the differences!

Spanish companies may not be the first to spring to mind when you think of some of the world’s largest multinationals, but Spain is a major player in the global market thanks to huge overseas investments over the last couple of decades. You may not have realised it, but Spanish companies are behind some of the best known brands on your high street.

Brands like Zara, Zara Home and Pull and Bear are high street staples throughout the UK. Behind these and 5 other brands is one of the world’s largest fashion retailers, the Inditex group, which has its headquarters in Arteixo, Galicia. The company was founded by Amancio Ortega, the richest man in Spain and 4th on the Forbes ‘Richest People on the Planet’ list 2014. Inditex began in the textiles industry back in 1963 and moved into fashion retail with the opening of the first Zara store in La Coruña in 1975. Inditex is now a global presence with over 6,000 and 128,000 employees around the globe.

In other fields, Spanish companies are also strong. In telecommunications, Telefónica is one of the key players and it staked its claim in the UK market with the purchase of O2 in 2006. Already a strong presence in Europe, Central and South America, Telefónica moved into the rapidly-expanding and lucrative Chinese market when it entered into an alliance with China Unicom. In banking it’s a similar success story, with the Santander group acquiring Alliance and Leicester and Abbey National amongst others.

With Spanish firms among the most successful in the world, there could not be a better time to start Spanish tuition. Our native tutors provide Spanish language courses throughout the London area, whether you want to learn for business or pleasure.

Spain has been a popular destination for British tourists for decades, but since the 1990s the number of British people taking up residence in Spain has expanded rapidly. It’s known as a popular retirement destination for ex-pats but figures suggest that only around 21.5% of the British population in Spain are over 65, proving it is a popular destination for British emigrants of all ages. With an estimated total of more than 700,000, concentrated mostly in the Valencian and Andalusian regions along with the Balearic and Canary Islands, Spain is home to one of the largest British populations outside of the UK.

Adapting to life in a foreign country is made so much easier when you have a command, even if only a basic one, of the language. Children who emigrate with their families while they are still of school age are of necessity immersed in the language and usually become fluently relatively quickly, though even for them some prior Spanish tuition will certainly put them at an advantage. For adults thinking of making the move to Spain, taking a Spanish language course can both help them make up their minds about whether it’s the right decision, and give them a head start which will help them settle into their new life. Lingua Clinic provides Spanish courses with native tutors throughout the London area, so if you are planning a life in the sun in Spain, let us help you prepare for it.

You might be forgiven for wondering what US media has to do with Spanish courses in London, but the boom that Spanish media is enjoying in the US is a good indicator of just how prevalent the language is becoming across the globe. What’s more, the wide availability of Spanish media from the US offers a plethora of opportunities for learners everywhere wishing to broaden their knowledge of the language.

Spanish media in the USA has grown at an astounding rate in the last decade. Spanish language newspapers in the US enjoy a circulation comparable with their English counterparts; 2011 saw the launch of the first 24-hour Spanish news channel, and numerous popular TV series are being remade in Spanish, notably the hugely successful Breaking Bad, a Spanish remake of which was announced this year. These success stories are also being mirrored in radio and magazines. With a Latino population of more than 50 million at the last census, it’s perhaps not surprising that Spanish media in the USA is flourishing.

It’s well worthwhile checking out some of the Spanish newspapers and magazines that are published in digital format or taking a look at some of the huge output of the Spanish language channels from the US. It’s a great way to expand your vocabulary and hone your reading and listening skills, and the very success of the many Spanish media outlets in the USA just goes to show that there really couldn’t be a better time to enrol on a Spanish language course and further swell the ranks of the speakers of the fastest-growing language in the world today.

Lingua Clinic Spanish Tutor London

London is well known as a multicultural city. Indeed, it stands second only to New York in terms of the diversity of its population. Statistics show that around 40% of the UK’s Spanish population live in London and figures from the 2011 census shows that Spanish is the 9th mostly widely spoken language in the UK’s capital, with a total of 71,192 regular residents, that’s 0.9% of the population, speaking the language. This means that anyone taking Spanish tuition in London shouldn’t have to travel too far in order to practise their language skills. Testament to this fact is the number of Spanish ex-pat support and networking groups which operate in and around the city.

Whether you have Spanish relatives or friends, are looking to learn the language to help in your career, or are simply looking for a new and stimulating learning experience, our Spanish language courses in London are the ideal place to start your journey. With patient and experienced native tutors providing a variety of lesson formats to fit around your needs and schedule at your home or office, we will get you off to the best possible start as you take your first steps learning the fastest-growing language in the world today. Take a look at some of our Spanish language course reviews to see what students have to say about our services – perhaps they will convince you to try us for yourself.

Pedro Almodóvar, as any film lover will know, is an internationally acclaimed and Academy award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter. He was born in 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, Spain. At eight years old he was sent to a religious boarding school in Cáceres where he had his first experience of the cinema, from which his own fascination and ambitions in that medium sprang. He’s quoted as saying of that time, “Cinema became my real education, much more than the one I received from the priest.”

Almodóvar’s movies, as he himself says, are very personal, drawing on his own experiences such as gay culture in Spain and the character of his mother. They frequently feature strong female central characters; they’re full of colour, passion and emotion; they’re irreverent, at times they’re downright outrageous and, despite the director’s protestations to the contrary, they have inevitably shaped the way their mass worldwide audience views Spain.

We’ve often advocated the use of film in this blog as a great way to expand your knowledge of the Spanish language, and we think that Almodóvar’s movies are some of the best you could choose for this purpose. Indeed, every Lingua Clinic Spanish tutor in London uses parts of his movies as a learning resource in the various Spanish courses we offer. If you’re not familiar with the movies, we strongly recommend viewing. Beginners can watch with subtitles; the more advanced may follow the dialogue – a wonderfully entertaining way to improve your Spanish when you have a Spanish course.

La familia. The family, as your Spanish tutor in London will tell you, is incredibly important to Spanish people. It’s a cornerstone of the Spanish culture, passed down from one generation to the next. Spanish families are typically very close and supportive, taking every opportunity to spend time together. This applies not just to immediate family, but also the extended family, so cousins tend to grow up together and this helps to reinforce the strength of the family bond.

The Spanish are very family orientated, probably more so than many of their British and other Northern European counterparts, where extended families can sometimes become quite dispersed under the pressures of fast-paced modern life. The Spanish family is a strong unit, which embraces and esteems members from the eldest generation down to the youngest: the Spanish are loving and tolerant towards children (not to suggest the British aren’t!) and family occasions often include children running around boisterously having fun without drawing any reprimands from the adults – they’re just being kids after all. Likewise, the older generation is also valued and well cared for. It is much more unusual, for example, for elderly relatives to be placed in care homes than it is in the UK. Instead they are cared for at home wherever possible.

Family meal times are observed in most households and this is just as much about talking and socialising as it is about the food itself. It’s the observance and upkeep of these traditional values and habits that keeps la familia central to Spanish life.