Borrowing designer clothes

Whenever stylists needs to borrow clothes for photoshoots or to dress up celebrities they usually visit showrooms to borrow designer clothes from all over the world. These showrooms are usually financed by the designers themselves with a monthly fee for the space the collections occupies and the showroom staff is supposed to help you speak for the brand and make sure it gets into as many magazines as possible. I have worked with showrooms in many different cities over the years but after I took over the lending out business myself things have really started to move, so I must say I'm pretty happy about the decision of not being represented anymore.
Nowadays the stylists contacts me in person and gives me the details about the photoshoot or event they have going on and I can Fedex whatever they need the same day. They choose from online catalogues and have it delivered the next day to their doorstep and return it when they're done. The only disadvantage is that they won't stumble upon my collection when going through their favourite showrooms, but hey I let them stumble upon me on the internet instead! There are so many stylists that check things online nowadays and the quality of the press clips I get from this is way higher than the incredibly boring "copy the celeb outfit" in the weekly gossip mags I used to get a lot of.
Berlin stylist Valerie Oster found me on the web earlier this Autumn and she borrows Ravishing Mad every now and then. She has the perfect relaxed yet cocky and androgynous Berlin style that I love so much and I was thrilled to see this Look At Me feature of her in Fashiondaily TV showing her favourite outfit right now. The vest with the long pockets are actually the upper part of the Ravishing Mad assdoor jumpsuit from SS-11!

Oh hello what am I doing?

Berlin Fashion Week is treating me to do my own fashion show in January, thank you, satan is now behind me! I'm spending the day draping and it looks like a vehicle canopy, this thing that I'm shaping...and this awesome soundtrack is on repeat.

My own evolution, Darwin and I we're like this tight

I made these sketches last Summer and they have been pinned to my wall for quite a while now together with the DIY stencil that I used to make custom shopping bags for the pop up store. It has become all shiny, hard and curly from all the spraying and gets more beautiful for each time I use it.

Shooting with Joy

A really cool girl named Joy Liljegren wrote me this Autumn and asked to join in this little world I have going on. I liked her way and I loved how she instantly dug into anything I threw at her. Last week I asked her to interpret Ravishing Mad by styling a photo shoot with any clothes she wanted, with any brand and any accessories. I especially liked the black dog bones and the liquorice necklace she came up with and while the storm was torturing everyone else, we built our own world in...yes of course a basement. You know I have a weakness for basements and imagine my lucky grin when I found this 100 year old basement with secret chambers and labyrinth like passages covering a whole block under my friend's house. Agnes was so perfect, calm and fun, melancholic and crazy, anything I asked for. See more of my photos here.

Stylist: Joy Liljegren         Model: Agnes Madsen

Photo: Anna Österlund

Who's beat?

Dearest Truls, my love, was as I completely beat after painting all the jeans and on top of that he bravely got into those fresh lowrise ones and threw himself in a trashy corner of the forsaken old shopping mall that we had sieged for the past week. What won't we do for a pretty pic?

Hand painted for Hong Kong

Photo: André de Loisted

When I was in Paris I met the buyers from the huge store D-Mop in Hong Kong and they fell in love with all the hand painted styles I had in the collection. They asked me to make them a special in-season production for them on these limited edition styles and oh am I glad the edition was...limited? Last week we sent them off and right now feels like a vacuum after all the hard work.

The idea of painting the outlines and all the seams originally came from a text that I wrote when sketching the Screaming Collection.

If you ever find me,
make me paper thin,
pin me up and leave me,
or sit on me with all your weight
with no restraint so I can't breath.

If you ever find me,
draw my outlines thick,
define me with a marker,
in any shape and every shade,
plastic lines of reds and greens.

But if you ever find me
I'll throw my weight on you,
with borrowed force I kick and scream,
tearing, I will wear you out,
biting, breathless still.

I hope you'll never find me.
I'll do my best to hide from you,
I have become what I most fear,
drop this cup that spills.







The garments I made were white and I thought that if one stands close to the white wall no one will see you. I bought a huge black marker pen and by drawing black outlines and even adding green and red, the world would turn into 3d and you would be seen. The new outlines would be a way to define a new start when one friend helps another. 

 

Last month we put six different jeans styles in production for Hong Kong and except for all the black machine dyed ones, we hand painted over 70 pairs for them plus some tops. First we washed all those white jeans with black seams in the laundry room in our basement, dried them and drove over to the Leonard garage where we did the fashion show this Summer. Mitt Möllan let us lend a huge dirty old room in the mall that used to be a super market and we started by putting up wires where the painted jeans could hang dry and we spread out big plastic sheets over the floor. Truls came to help me after work in the evenings and we did the light grey wrinkled wash that made me think of how one would look if shaped as a thin paper that someone had wrinkeld and thrown in the corner. The black outlines on white turned out really well and I especially liked the the gorgeous dappled industrial grey jeans with sloppy black outlines. After a week we were finished and fixated the colour in the enormous oven at Konstnärernas Kollektivverkstad and then awaited the worst work so far of sewing on all the tags.

I really want my customers to not be afraid of changing my fashion into their own fashion, I think it's a pitty that so many people think of designer clothes as holy, so I put a little note on them encouraging the future owner to not washing unless necessary and to do whatever they want with their new garment.I'm hoping it will lead to someone putting paint on them or cutting them off or whatever.

It was quite silly how I made this tag, it pretty low tech in every way possible. I wanted to make a graffiti stencil out of the Ravishing Mad logo and the easiest way, yeah I know, would have been to print it and cut it out with a scalpel. The last part I got right but since the printer was out of ink I pencil traced it from the computer screen. I went outside with the stencil and a piece of paper and sprayed the black limited edition logo and wrote some well chosen words with the great big marker pen and then I asked the print shop to reproduce the tag for me so we could attach it to the back pocket of the jeans.

We did over produce and right now our living room has boxes of seven fantastic styles that will enter our webshop next year in all the coolest colours...

Ravishing Mad SS-12 Catwalk show

Pics of my Darwin Collection from the fashion show last week. Producing 14 different jeans styles in lots of sizes for men and women in all kinds of garment dyes and spray can effects. Unisex one-off tops in stiff denim with raw edges or burn marked soft matt silk with pilling and on top of that hundreds of meters of shoelace and plenty of heavy spikes. The one-offs will be sold sometime around the turn of the year and yeah baby only one unique piece per style!