Fine Art Fashion
Helena Fredriksson, a young Swedish fashion designer based in Brooklyn, was one of the rising stars to be featured in this year's Gen Art Fresh Faces in Fashion show at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York earlier this year. Not only is lifeiscarbon® in love with the H Fredriksson range but we also predict it will be a label to watch in 2007.
Fredriksson is a self-taught fashion designer with a formal background in the fine arts. Her approach to design is very sculptural, with draping techniques and unconventional shapes that are strongly influenced by her view of the body as sculpture. The balance in her collection is found in the mix of opposites; loose silhouettes matched with tapered shapes or elegant cuts with a raw finish (see below for a selection of images from the SS07 collection).
Many of her pieces are detailed with silk-screen prints based on her own photography, which adds a painterly touch to her garments. During all of her runway shows, Fredriksson has presented film installations made in collaboration with film artist English Kills and her husband, the composer Mike Skinner. The films are designed to communicate a sense of the less tangible inspirations that have influenced the colors, prints and designs in each of her collections.
After arriving in New York in 1997 to attend the Art Students League, specializing in painting and printmaking, Ms. Fredriksson met Mike Skinner, a music producer and drummer for indie rockers Kevin Devine & the Goddamn Band. They married in 2000, and she got a job as an assistant store manager for the Spanish company Camper after meeting a guy who worked there while traveling on a bus in Mexico. After which she scrimped and saved and started her own line.
Comments