New York to Stockholm and Back Again: An Interview with Carin Rodebjer

Swedish designer Carin Rodebjer recently relocated to New York. After the Rodebjer show, which is always the highlight of Stockholm Fashion Week, I asked her a few questions on her move, and how it has influenced the design of her new Fall 2012 collection.  One of my favorite shows of the season, the collection was inspired by male style icons like Jean Cocteau, David Hockney, and Jean Michel Basquiat.

You moved to New York from Stockholm recently. How has that been for you, do you feel like a New Yorker now?
No not really! I just moved there one year ago. But I feel kind of connected to the city--It is such a nice city, and I feel that it is good to have both platforms, because you get so much inspiration and you see things from different perspectives.

Did New York have any influence on the design of your new collection?
Oh, of course it does. That's part of why I moved too, because I wanted to have the local and the global perspective.  That's why we chose to show here [at Matthias Dahlgren's restaurat] too, because Matthias works on both a local and global level. That's how I want the collection to be--more global.

You said that your collection was influenced by menswear this season, so what kind of menswear details did you incorporate?
The buttons, shirt collars, bags, and shoes are very masculine.  All those menswear details were things we added.  But we were also inspired by the mindset, all the men that we were inspired by this season were their own universe, so I wanted to have that mindset, with a very focused woman being the center of her own universe.

Would you ever consider doing menswear? 
Yeah, I am considering it! I would love to do it, but it will take a while because we can still dig deeper into what we are. I want to work a little bit now to focus on the design with the womanswear, and then we will move on to menswear.

I've also noticed that this season and last season you've incorporated more color and prints. Can you tell me more about the digital prints and the floral prints that you used this season?
Oh yeah, we wanted to have really rich prints so it kind of symbolized the rich lives that our icons were having, and the richness of their personalities. So it's kind of rich prints with a more structured outside. I like prints, even though that's not very Swedish.  I like prints when they are balanced, and when they're controlled and clean.

Do you have any plans of showing in New York.
I do a little in the back of my head. So we'll see, whenever we have a little more money, I would love to do it!

-Tiffany

Déjà vu

Having just started my Pinterest account less than a week ago, I've gone from being completely bemused and somewhat skeptical to totally obsessed within a matter of days.  I love the quick and simple ease of clicking a button and immediately scrapbooking the bits and bobs that you come across while trawling the internet.

This sort of personal library is exactly what inspired the designers behind Hernandez Cornet for Fall 2012, who drew upon a year's worth of collected references.  The collection returns to all of these ideas and sources of inspiration, and attempts to combine and reconfigure them with their own voice.  The sense of repetition and reinterpretation is reflected in the clothes, which are selection of classic garment types such as trench coats, biker jackets, and flight jackets, all reworked in different materials. While similar silhouettes and styles appear more than once, they look entirely different when they are made from PVC and when they are made from psychedelic printed poplin.  In this case of déjà vu, you might believe that you have seen the look before, but it appears entirely different the second time around.

-Tiffany

Original Sin: Stine Goya AW12

Stine Goya is a perennial favorite of mine, bordering on obsession.  When I went down to Copenhagen Fashion Week earlier this month, I was incredibly excited to get to see her show, knowing that it would be filled with Goya's very specific brand of eclectic elegance.  This season the designer went with a biblical theme: the Garden of Eden.  Models strode out of a giant gilt apple, and were adorned with golden snake jewelry, as well as a couple of heavily embroidered black sequin serpents.  Really though, it was more of what Goya does best: gorgeous custom prints, perfect chunky twisted knits, and classic silhouettes that have been slightly tweaked so that they look entirely new, all layered with a pinch of sparkle and strass.  I can't pinpoint what exactly makes Goya's clothes so magical this season, but I know that it creates deep stirrings of material lust that can be traced all the way back to when Eve took her first bite into the apple.

-Tiffany

Storytelling

During Stockholm Fashion Week Maria Nilsdotter presented her eponymous jewelry line at The Story Hotel, which served as the perfect fairytale setting, with taxidermy swans, dripping candelabras, live harp music, and several model/princesses decked out in a royal array of fine jewels.  The theme of the Fall 2012 collection was "The Swan Suit," a tale of a princess who loses her magical suit which allows her to transform into a swan, and is then left behind when all her sisters turn back into swans and fly away.  The resulting jewels included plenty of stunningly rendered metal feathers, airy white lace crowns, and of course, plenty of graceful, long necked swans.  Even though the overall subject matter is very princessy and femme, the underlying melancholy of the tale seeps through.  Perfect for those who can't decide if they're a white swan, a black swan, or both at the same time.

-Tiffany

Unconscious Minds

All photos by Kristian Löveborg

One of my favorite shows of Stockholm Fashion Week was Beckman's College of Design Graduate Show.  I find graduate shows exciting because you not only get to see an assortment of designers presenting at once, but you get to see people who are fully exploring their ideas of fashion on a very conceptual basis, without necessarily having to worry about selling the collection to buyers afterwards.

There were many wonderful mini-collections on display which I'll have to revisit separately, but the one that stuck out the most for me was Amandah Andersson's presentation of four looks.  Inspired by surrealist art and the exploration of the human subconscious, the collection juxtaposed the outer shell of the human body with the interior world within.  Andersson created a peach colored knitted dress and a pair of pants with large sagging folds, creating a distorted, semi-disturbing revisualization of human skin.  These heavy looking pieces were paired with garments printed with airy, dreamlike patterns: one echoed Magritte's clouds, another presented a trippy watercolor mishmash of soft swirls and geometric bricks.  Beyond the concept though, I found the construction of the clothes highly imaginative.  I am curious to know how those sagging knit folds were made, how heavy those pieces feel on the body, how warm they are (they look fantastically warm).  I also found the printed pieces to be highly wearable and covetable. While Andersson let loose with her fantastic dreams, she still seems to have a strong grounding in reality.

-Tiffany

Arctic Chills: J. Lindeberg Autumn Winter 2012

J. Lindeberg won the prize for most weather appropriate attire for Stockholm Fashion Week with the theme of "A Day in the Arctic."  For Fall 2012, the label presented a mixture of formal and utilitarian wear at their scenic showroom located inside the Fotografiska Institute while a continuous onslaught of Nordic snow shimmered through the windows.  Head Designer Jessy Heuvelink presented each look, which included padded down shorts layered over knitted leggings, two-toned wool suit jackets, and wing tip brogues. While I personally am not very into preppy attire, I'm impressed by the progressive tailoring and design touch that Heuvelink transposed on rather classic pieces.  He commented that they were appropriate for an Artic Wedding, seamlessly combining formal attire with more functional technical fabrics built to withstand a day out on the arctic tundra.  With the weather hovering around 15F for the past week, I've been faced with the challenge of trying to look passable while also staying warm, and I think any designer can be commended for providing form alongside function.  Now I just wonder what they have in store for women.

-Tiffany