admin The concurrence of Moschino’s 40th anniversary and Avavav’s first time showing on Milan’s official calendar seems to be one of those instances of meaningful, if coincidental, synchronicity. In three short years, Beate Karlsson has established a reputation as a disruptor; with spring’s No Time to Design, No Time to Explain collection, she followed in Franco Moschino’s footsteps by assuming the role of fashion’s conscience as well. Like the Italian, she’s able to maintain a sense of humor in the process.
A young Swede, trained in London and New York and operating between Stockholm and Florence, Karlsson’s anthropomorphic footwear is Instagram gold, as were her previous two outings. In one, models stumbled their way down the runway—a play on the falling-model meme. The following season was a parade of walking fashion disasters as models’ clothes fell off and straps and heels broke as they navigated the catwalk. Asked if she felt pressure to make noise, Karlsson had this to say: “It’s been super-important for us, obviously, for the past two years because we were completely new. We needed to be like, ‘Hey, here’s a brand! This is us!’ But I’m starting to get a little bit sick of it, because I think there’s a general trend in the industry right now to be loud, which can be very painful and almost feel desperate when there’s no depth to it. For us, it’s been super-important to know that there’s actually something we want to say.”
Hired as the creative director of the brand in 2020, last year Karlsson and a partner bought out the original owners and since then have been in seemingly endless meetings poring over contracts and negotiating with lawyers. Not only did this give the designer a view into the behind-the-scenes reality of the business, but it left her little time to actually put her training into practice and make clothes. Karlsson is not the only creative person to feel this way; this is a situation many people are in. Putting specific business cases aside, the number of audiences a designer is meant to be in constant contact with—and satisfy—is simply untenable. This Avavav outing, the designer wrote, was “about the frustration, anger, and anxiety that this stress creates and the irony in it.”
