Couture blanche

Couture Blanche Beckmans College of Design BA Fashion ’27 April 14, Liljevalchs Konsthall

Theo Sternehäll

Taking a front row seat at the BA ’27 couture runway at Liljevalchs Konsthall, prior to showtime, a few things become clear. The person next to me whispers to her friend that this cohort is marked by an unusual number of students who, from the look of the pages in the accompanying booklet, could be presumed not to be women. I confirm this observation to myself and expect a more visible rejection of gender binaries and gender coded cuts and silhouettes. However, the characteristic design illustrations by the luminary Lovisa Burfitt, who once seriously mainstreamed fashion illustration as graphic print art, interpreting the thirteen looks, one by each of the thirteen designers, reveal little on that note. The class collaboration with two family run silk manufacturers in Greece appears to be foregrounded by an overall air of apparent femininity in white.

Jacob Borgenstierna Ploski

Coming to observe the Beckmans College of Design runways has now been a practice for nearly ten years, sparked by a conversation with the delightful Maria Ben Saad, Senior Lecturer in Fashion Theory at the school. As an artistic director and curator of visual art, I have often felt a stronger catalyzing impulse to return to my desk and dive back into my own work after these shows than from the routine viewing of exhibitions locally in Stockholm. Apropos of Liljevalchs Konsthall, when I co curated Vårsalongen 2024, it was the Fashion ’23 graduate Tim Maksimovic whom I asked to dress me for the press days, including on TV. You see, contemporary art in Stockholm is not particularly glitzy, unless you count black and white vernissage mingle photos à la Purple magazine, circa 2013, which I do not care much for. So, this runway, in this very moment, is giving me my own The Devil Wears Prada kick, as I look around the front row toward OG nostalgic style icons like Marina Kereklidou and Ingela Klementz Farago. Only in this front row, the devil, someone else, who shall remain unnamed, unless you are exceptionally good at blind items, wears Céline.

John Ölén

Pondering this runway show, the concept and my own reflections are prefaced by thoughts on what the couture of the future might serve or become, and what impositions the notion of couture may be subjected to in a world in flux and transformation. Interestingly, being at the show evoked a sense of a time warp, or even a time loop, in more ways than one. The fashion gravitas the students have access to is manifested by leading canon shaping figures in Swedish fashion like Bea Szenfeld and Sandra Backlund being involved as mentors in the ateliers. I try to count if I have referred to the latter three, four, or five times, or more, covering fashion at Beckmans over the years. But yes, the students and their creations offer nods back to their predecessors. I can see a whiff of Szenfeld’s paper orchestrations and her haute papier in the gothic, angelic wings coming down the runway around Jacob Borgenstierna Ploski’s shouldered retro bubble dress. And while knits are out of view, a trace of Backlund’s formal vocabulary can be perceived, at least transiently. John Ölén is one of the graduate candidates who stands out right off the bat by working through reduction, while also empowering couture through protective, almost defensive architectural forms, coming across with likely unintentional humour as resisting critiques predisposed to label couture, already in the present, superfluous. Couture, largely in the exhibition, remains faithful to codes of wearable elegance, rather than embracing more conceptual propositions that reimagine it through self irony or distance. A notable exception, and another clear takeaway, is Edit Hulting, whose top part offers allusions to a corset, while the bottom part playfully contrasts the notion of bodily sur mesure couture with an oversized folded skirt, several sizes too wide from edge to edge, optically bringing to mind a rejection of couture rules.

Edit Hulting

In a post-pandemic world, thinking of couture from a future lens, it is surprising not to see more cuts that juxtapose couture expression with practical function and protection. Alum Erik Olsson, back in 2018, aptly brought forward this idea with his graduate collection Bojskaut, imagining a world where fashion might need to protect humans against surroundings marked by external pollution. He stressed how masks were already being used in several of the world’s largest cities due to polluted air. Between the echoes of Margiela and Gaultier, and rule benders of the past, I might have expected some more unprecedented je ne sais quoi responding to red alert crisis mode.

Ashik Zaman