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Hedi Nilausen, Beckmans College of Design knitwear show

Hedi Nilausen, Beckmans College of Design knitwear show

Gone in the wind: a pair of drab Stockholmian fashion days in the midst of minor key mid winter

Claes Britton | Jan 29, 2009 | 4 comments

Something about these aspiring Stockholmian fashion days in the thick of the grimmest, ugliest late January turns me downhearted; or, more correctly, some things. This should come as no surprise, since merely stomping around in the gray frozen streets of our cityscape this time of year, spared though they may be from the curse of filth-saturated snow and ice, is enough to tune the merriest, most sparkling of moods into doomsday D-minor, all the more with that deep black mental backdrop of recession looming beyond the lowly steel gray winter skies. No more joyful did one become from the off-black, thick-knitted masses of cloth in audiences and upon the catwalks, weakly contrasted only by bleek grays and the odd, faintly flickering gleam of light and color. The signs we saw in the past season of a heart for more color and play were now eradicated, perhaps by the ghost of recession. The notion that dressing anonymously and non-descript in faded nuances of black is a Swedish national tradition was once again reinforced.

Then there's something about this blogging following shrouding our domestic fashion scene these days — those muster-strong herds of black-clad school girls eternally busy photographing each others' "outfits", who now dominate the fashion week crowds. It's indeed a brand new reality, radically different from that of our small Stockholm fashion family as recently as a decade ago. Say, why do I find it so hard to rejoice and enthuse over this new and expanded scene, heavy as it may be with the feel of suburbian schoolgirl den? Why do I feel, once again, like Burt Lancaster's aged patriarch in the film 1900 part 1, who, clad in a tailored white linen suite and wide-brimmed straw hat, hangs himself in the barn, after the young maid vainly has tried to milk his withered teat, while the young farm workers are dancing to the tunes of inciting flutes in the summer greenery outside?

I didn't see all that much this time around, but ran out of steam already after the chilled out walk back from the Whyred show at Liljevalchs art gallery in Djurgården island on Tuesday afternoon. From what I did see, Minimarket made something of a mark with a show that, in spite of some annoying whims, featured qualities such as color, playfulness and neat, cute cuts, casted and styled with brilliance by our beloved friend and collaborator Ingela Klemetz Farago. Much as before, I didn't quite know what to make of the Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair show. It was once again a whole lot of everything, draporama, spectacle and gimmicks, reminiscent of those childhood masquerade days. Prosaic reality, saggy volumes, coarse materials and black, black, mixed up with gray and faded complementary colors were the main impressions from the Rodebjer and Whyred shows, both congenial with the weather as well as with my own personal state of mind.

Most fun and inspiring was, as ususal, the knitwear show from the Beckmans College of Design, where playfully creative fashion theatre has not yet been confronted with our middle class commercial reality. This season's show was even sharper than usual, with several highlights. The brightest shining star was Hedi Nilausen's "Warriors" — singular, mysterious and imposing ankle-length silhouettes. Another original, feminine and actually sexy — a rare quality in Swedish fashion — mini collection was Azade Habibnia’s "No Color", slim-fitting long dresses with interesting optical patterns. Fanny Ollas’ and Erik Anerborn’s androgyneous male collections wer also amusing, if not as surprising. I could name several others, even though we’ve now seen quite enough of those knitted bobbins inspired by Sandra Backlund. Let’s hope that there’s some room for all this creativity, if not down home, then elsewhere.

What surprised me most with this fashion week was that the shows, after all, were so numerous. I was expecting that the collapsing market would already have inflated the bubble infused by venture capital in our diminutive fashion industry. The next test will the the spring/summer shows which, as I understand, are once again planned for the first week of July. We can only hope that the event "Fahion Week by Berns", now with Princess Madeleine as "patron", has gathered enough critical mass to survive in the long term. There's now finally some talk from our authorities of founding an official institution of a kind that has long been in operation in, for example, Denmark, with the ambition of building a stronger, more farsighted organisation (a somewhat higher finish would also be welcome...). More and more politicians are waking up to the news that fashion is an "industry of the future", now that they’ve tired of interior design as flavor of the day. This could indeed be so, though I fear that our Swedish designers and brands at least in the near future will continue to be confined to our own particular niche — low-key, trend-conscious ready-to-wear in the lower and mid-prize ranges for the younger middle classes, above all denim. Not that glamorous or sexy perhaps, but quite honorable and in best case "job-creating", as we say. In any case, a proper fashion week in our city core is of course a substantial addition to our urban array.

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