Ravishing Mad Webshop

Yeah baby yeah, the webshop is finally up! My husband Truls has programmed it to perfection and we'll keep filling the stock with new cool styles along the way. We want happy customers so of course we offer free shipping worldwide and all transactions are made through the secure PayEx service.

Lady Gaga's Ravishing Mad dress in Malmö Sweden

Lady Gaga is coming to town this weekend so the local newspaper Tidningen City here in Malmö decided to dedicate a little project to her. They asked me and two other local designers to spend a couple of hours each making her a crazy dress from secret material. We were separately given different materials to work with the day before yesterday and I got turquoise and gold coloured gift wrapping paper, the designer at Din Favoritpolack got a couple of cabbage heads and Robert Och Blad coffee cups, coffee filters and cake accessories.

Gaga's most outrageous costumes always seam to have a very clear theme no matter what it is and I found some images from her visit to Japan where she dressed as a crazy geisha. I thought to myself that since she's coming to Sweden I'd better make her something that reminds one of that. And what about the theme...well, I didn't find any outfits of her dressed as neither a flag nor a wrapped gift and I made a quick decision on what to do.

The dress, it had to be short. Gaga likes short, very short. I wrapped her in blue paper and made a huge shiny rousette in the front, cut the gold paper into a ribbon and tied her just as you always do ie like a cross all around the package. Never mind her head and crotch, Gaga doesn't give a fuck about conventions. And then loads of little cute parcels all over the skirt. The square foundation around the hips I made from an old shoe box I found in my wardrobe. I spent 4 hours with my glue gun and vóila! I named it GAGA GIVEAWAY.

Ida Annie Kyllerman, model and makeup artist, came over the following day and together we came up with a wicked makeup and hair style. I thought of the dress as a contrast between a young and cute birthday girl verses a fearless stage show artist. I curled her hair into lots of cork screws, Ida did an amazing job with the makeup. She enlarged her eyes with huge eylashes under the eyes and made graphic shapes of pink around the eyes and cheeks. Her bleached eyebrows fit perfectly into that crazy look.

Photographer Mårten Svemark took some vicious shots of Ida in my elevator and journalist Tara Moshizi wrote the article. They told us the editorial staff had turned Gaga crazy from the project and didn't allow any other music at the office that day. And when all the other City editions in the rest of the region of Southern Sweden heard of it all they decided to run it in all the editions today.

The dresses are displayed this weekend in the huge windows at street level of Tidningen City Malmö/Lund at Stortorget in Malmö.

Ravishing Mad S/S-11 Collection

The SS11 collection from Ravishing Mad sees the brain child of Swedish designer Anna Österlund take determined steps towards a more sinister expression, embracing elements of d.i.y. punk and urban dystopia in combination with the tongue-in-cheek avantgarde flair of previous collections. It is a "fuck you very much and goodbye" to good manners and to any habits of putting on the happy face.




Inspirations draw from the raw and passionate anger of "The Decline of Western Civilization" to the pounding melancholy of The Cure's "Pornography" over the slacked-off aesthetics of grunge rock and the mad beat genius of Allen Ginsberg. The collection offers 10 denim styles in colours like bright red, black, airbrushed grey and print/wash combination blue. Well-known for the draped big pocket jeans with extremely high waist Ravishing Mad continue to incorporate the draped cuts. Key garments include oversize plaid shirts with assymetric "drunk buttoning", unisex ass-door jumpsuits and mesh hoodies with huge sagging pockets. Prices are in the upper mid segment and the collection will be out in stores in February 2011.

Ravishing Mad is a denim based anti-fashion brand that works closely with underground musicians, artists, photographers and film makers alike in devotion to experimental creation for the benefit of every party involved.
People involved with these, often hilariously entertaining, and indeed ravishingly mad design projects are frequently switching places and either modeling, contributing with music and/or in charge of the camera documenting the process.
Although adhering to Swedish design traditions of high quality, clean lines and stressing functionality, designs are deliberately pushed further, incorporating strong accent colours and straying from the strictness of traditional cuts. The collections offer both women‘s, men’s and unisex styles, in ready-to-wear as well as more extreme versions.




The label was founded in Malmö, Sweden by designer Anna Österlund after graduating from the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås and the first collection was presented in 2008. She now runs Ravishing Mad with her husband Truls Bråhammar.

Explaining the philosophy behind Ravishing Mad, Anna Österlund states:

“... I don’t like to divide my life into sections, I live it blurred. Work and fun can happen at any time, so I really don’t think there is any need to label it. I go play with my friends, or work, we might sometimes call it work and sometimes not. It evolves into music for some of us, or photos and videos, and some in clothes, or we just mix it all. I love these collaborations and look for them everywhere! I also do two major collections a year under the label Ravishing Mad (and denim is my thing). I show them at the fashion weeks of Paris, New York, Copenhagen and Berlin, but prefer the guerilla way, the anti-fashion way, the fun way.”

Danish designer and multi-artist Henrik Vibskov was one of the first to discover the Ravishing Mad denims and has been stocking them in his stores in Copenhagen and Olso since the very first collection.
Since then Ravishing Mad has also been available at Urban Outfitters online, Delta in Tokyo, Rac boutique in Toronto, TG-170 in NYC, PotiPoti in Berlin, Bespoke Boutique in Norwich and many more.

Recent online articles about this collection:
Italian Frizzifrizzi
American This Heart's On Fire
Canadian KaKofonie Of si(gh)lenS
KaKofonie Of si(gh)lenS (again)
Egyptian Men's Fashion By Francesco

Outrageous sketching

Who else do I know that would react like that if I threw a coffee soaked cloth in his lap? -Just smear it in, baby! He glanced at it for a sec and then instinctivly rubbed his tight white jeans into a stained and brilliant nasty old shade. I did it too, and the warm fluid soon stuck to the legs like an itching old woollen bathing suit. I force myself to imagine that at least...the first thought that came to my mind was something else. The smell was pretty damn good, though.

The secret chamber in my basement is starting to become a favourite place. (Remember, that's where I cut my friends hair late one night last summer.) We collected some stylish old rags from the -90'ies, brewed a bucket of coffee and went down there with our 3 mpx pocket cameras and had a swell time. Hands on sketching at it's best. We tried the rags on in all ways possible: upside down, inside out, leaping, jumping and dancing. It was caught in a thousand frames as proof of true narcissist artistic fanaticism.

After, we printed ourselves, cut and glued, painted, drew and sprayed it into a collection. The Autumn/Winter-11 collection was emerging.

RebekkaMaria wearing Ravishing Mad

The groovy Danish junglepop/eskimopop artist RebekkaMaria just rocked the cult tv show Oslobåden in our Ravishing Mad leather gloves with fringes, check it out 14 min. into the episode!

Jet Olivia and Leslie Van Stelten

Jet Olivia is a proper cool New York stylist that I've had my eyes on for a while now. She gives a true rock 'n' roll soul to anything she gets her hands on and you could imagine my delight when I found out that she used some of my Ravishing Mad clothes in one of her recent photo shoots. Check these photos of the unisex cardigan that I once named The Struggling Musician.
Photo by wicked photographer Leslie Van Stelten, who none the less is a true artist with a fearless mind.

Ps. I happen to have one of those cardigans left...