Swedish designer Sandra Backlund recently won the top prize at the Hyeres Festival of Fashion and Photography, France’s most prestigious award for emerging young designers. The designer, whose collection entitled Ink Blot Test featured mini dresses with petal like tops, took home a prize of 15,000 Euros and free exhibition space at two key ready-to-wear trade salons, Tranoi in Paris and Ideal in Berlin.
Looking at Sandra Backlund’s collections nearly always induces a sense of tactile sensory overload. Completely handmade, her designs take knitting to a new level by transforming strands of yarn into wearable sci-fi sculptures. Each garment is created from many small pieces that are combined together to form dramatic sweaters, dresses, shrugs and leggings. Enormous cable knits, pompoms and crochet weavings embellish her stunning designs. Take a look below at a selection of images from her first five collections:
Sandra Backlund started out by studying fine arts in college, then textiles and art history and only later decided to pursue fashion by enrolling at the Beckman’s School of Design in Stockholm. Her varied background shows through in her beautifully constructed and intricately detailed knitwear creations, at times reiterating the shape of the body, at times standing proud of the wearer due to the nature of the material used by the designer.
Her very first collection, Body, Skin and Hair, partially employed human hair, carefully and painstakingly styled into garments by sewing it onto a fabric lining, then combing, cutting, braiding and pinning. The Perfect Hurts collection harked back to the Elizabethan Era with fan collars and puffed sleeves and Don’t Walk, her last but one collection was made entirely of red knits.
Previous Collections
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