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Tag archives for Lovisa Burfitt

Illustrating the fashionable

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Illustration by Lovisa Burfitt.

Fashion used to be illustrated, capturing the allure of clothes with lines and colour. Then photography came along and after a rocky start, it became the preferred art form of the style universe.

More than ten years ago, when I started out as a fashion journalist, it was often difficult to get good samples from any well-known brands. Stylists often had to emulate the looks off the catwalk, using vintage clothes or imaginative styling.

In that period, it was sometimes easier to use fashion illustration to convey the key pieces of the season since you could choose exactly which look you wanted. Maybe this is why Sweden has been quite successful in the fashion illustration department?

Sweden’s most famous fashion illustrator is called Mats Gustafson. During the Eighties he worked with everyone and dazzled art directors with his sophisticated style.

But since then there have been many others.

Lovisa Burfitt lives in Paris and also works as a fashion designer. She is perhaps the most obvious heir to Mats Gustafson aesthetically with her watercolour-based drawings. But it is an updated aesthetic, reflecting her interest in punk and street fashion. She has worked with Vogue and just made a line of porcelain for Rörstrand, featuring her illustrations.

Dorothea Barth Jörgensen, by Liselotte Watkins.

Living in Milan, Liselotte Watkins works regularly for D, the fashion supplement for Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Her biggest triumph was when Miu Miu chose her illustrations for their Spring/Summer 2008 fashion show, featuring them as patterns on ten different dresses.

An illustration by Kristian Russell.

Another successful Swedish illustrator is Kristian Russell, currently based in New York. The illustrations could be described as a modern take on psychedelic and has landed him jobs for a variety of Vogues as well as brands such as Nike and Diesel.

From these examples it is easy to see that Swedish fashion illustration isn’t very minimalist at all. Rather it is bursting with colour and pattern clashes, an interesting aside to my previous post about the lack of colour in Swedish fashion.

Daniel Björk - Fashion

April 7, 2011

In Sweden, women designers prove old clichés wrong

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A piece from Nhu Duong's graduation collection in 2008.

The stereotypical gay fashion designer is not that often found in Sweden these days. In fact, the most successful designers tend to be women, with some notable exceptions like Lars Wallin and Jonny Johansson at Acne (the latter who, if we are nit-picking, is not gay).

Not that I’m complaining. It’s nice to see that the overwhelming majority of female students in the design schools is reflected in the roster of successful designers as well.

In fact, the rise of Swedish fashion design during the Noughties was initiated by three women designers, all of whom are still designing. Lovisa Burfitt, Carin Rodebjer and Ann-Sofie Back all contributed something special to the scene, but shared (as I have already mentioned) a belief in fashion as a discipline and a form of expression.

Today the most interesting of the Swedish designers are women almost all of them. I’m talking about Sandra Backlund, who with her organic and futuristic knitwear showed that Swedish fashion design can be original, daring and reach an international audience. I’m also talking about Helena Hörstedt who might not be as well known as the former, but who has a lot in common with Sandra Backlund – they both have a very handicraft-based approach to clothes. To these to I’d also like to add Nhu Duong who marries the conceptual side of designers such as Ann-Sofie Back with the handicraft of Backlund and Hörstedt. (Sadly, Helena Hörstedt is not designing at the moment, taking a hiatus when becoming pregnant. But here’s hoping she will return soon. Sweden needs her.)

Most of the designers I admire in some ways design “against” the Swedish fashion norm, as a kind of reaction perhaps. I wrote about this in the catalog for the Swedish Institute’s fashion exhibition Swedish Fashion – Exploring a New Identity and you can read my thoughts here.

But in a more interesting way, these women show that the idea that women design practical clothes for themselves (while men who design for women are supposedly more interested in fashion as fantasy) is clearly mistaken. The incredibly intricate work of these designers cannot be described as wearable, even though these clothes definitely does transform the wearer into a beautiful walking piece of art. They prove that women designers are just as good at exploring the fantasy side of fashion as male designers have been.

Daniel Björk - Fashion

March 6, 2011

How I discovered fashion and learned to love Ann-Sofie Back

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Here I am, on the verge of discovering fashion. And no, the Italian guy was my friend, nothing else, despite appearances.

How does anyone discover fashion? I grew up in Borås, the old textile centre of Sweden. Maybe that has something to do with it? But, in reality, I hardly knew anyone who worked in the business. My brother’s girlfriend’s mother worked for Ted Lapidus, but that’s about it and to be fair, Borås was mainly a textile hub in the 1950s.

In my teens I started reading magazines such as The Face and i-D. I remember a discussion I had with my friends about what the people working at these hipster havens would be wearing. Now I know they probably just wore jeans and T-shirts like everyone else.

Still what pushed me in the direction of fashion was actually going abroad and studying for a year in Italy. At the time, the late 1990s, Stockholm and Sweden had only started becoming the trend hub it is today. People were more interested in white labels (12” vinyl) than designer labels.

In Italy I was confronted with a culture saturated with fashion. Style was everywhere and people knew what you were wearing even when they couldn’t see the brand name. It was a completely foreign concept to me.

Coming back to Sweden I realised that things were very different here. But something else was in the air as well. There seemed to be a growing interest in how to dress, in the joy of fashion, and also in the meaning of style. Soon I was writing about the new crop of Swedish designers, people like Ann-Sofie Back, Lovisa Burfitt and Carin Rodebjer, who were all starting out at that time.

I’ve seen many designers come and go, but there was something different with these three. To them, fashion was enough in itself, and they didn’t try to disguise it as something else (design, graphic design, art). They had a pride in fashion which previous Swedish fashion devotees had not been able to muster. Along with them a new generation of photographers and stylists came on to the scene and new edgy magazines started pushing the mainstream women’s titles towards a more fashion-centric approach. It was like a fashion education.

Sometimes I look back in amazement at how quickly Sweden went from a fashion phobic nation to the trend-conscious country it is today. Heritage and tradition goes a long way, but change can also happen very quickly.

I feel quite blessed to have lived through this change, because unlike the younger generation I know what Sweden was like before the ubiquitous fashion bloggers, style sections and fashion personalities of today. In some ways it was gentler and more fun – because it was more amateurish – but on the whole it’s nice to be able to talk about Acne Jeans and Maison Martin Margiela (even though the company isn’t Swedish) without having to explain what they are.

Daniel Björk - Fashion

January 26, 2011