Borrowing designer clothes

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!

Mikael Karlsson composer

Last week I showed my SS-12 Darwin collection at the new fashion scene 38minuter in Malmö to music from the extremely talented Swedish (NYC based) composer Mikael Karlsson. His music has been performed at cool places like Carnegie Hall and he has collaborated with Kleerup, Lykke Li, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet among others. His music has moved on to video games like Battlefield Bad Company and he has received a long line of awards over the years, this being still under the age of 40.
He has a darkness in his music that I just love and best of all he's extremely active in questioning and developing classical music into contemporary in a kinda punk way. We have been sending each other a whole lot of e-mails back and forth the last week and I think I've found myself a soulmate! Today he sent me a fantastic little tune for our next collab and we have already started brainstorming the storyline for the video I'll be make him in September. Until then, he's treating all of you RM fans out there with a free download of three of his albums (including the piece Ends that I used in the fashion show). They will be available to download on his homepage under the news section (under title: 38minuter) and on dropbox until August 30 and I hope you'll love it as much as I do!

Mikael Karlsson, photo by Niklas Aexandersson

Fashion Show Press Release

Here follows a Swedish press release for our Malmö fashion show on Wednesday:

Photo: Anna Österlund

Malmö har många talangfulla modedesigners som är på väg att bli stora på ett internationellt plan. De vill visa Sverige och världen att detta är en stad att räkna med nu och i framtiden men det har saknats en arena som sammanför dem med hemmapubliken.

Därför har tre internationellt erkända svenska modedesigners verksamma i Öresundsregionen gått samman för att högkoncentrerat och storslaget med en modevisning visa sina vår/sommar-2012-kollektioner för Malmöpubliken.

Det behövs aktörer som stödjer sina lokala designers på samma höga nivå som Stockholm och Göteborg gör genom modevisningar, modemässor och andra evenemang. "Närheten till den stora modestaden Köpenhamn borde vara en fördel i jämförelse med de andra svenska storstäderna, ändå ligger vi långt efter i antal event som hålls", säger Anna Österlund designer för Ravishing Mad. Hon fortsätter berätta att hon länge tänkt på att mode i Malmö har inte fått lika stort utrymme att visa upp sig live som musik, dans och teater och att det nu är dags att ta saken i egna händer. Anna ser det här som starten på en profilering av Malmö som modestad.

Tillsammans med Jenny Grettve är Anna Österlund initiativtagare till den nya modescenen som går under namnet 38 minuter. Eventet koncentreras till att visa mode i sin renaste form samtidigt som samarbetaen över olika konstnärliga discipliner är en viktig del. -Därför har vi valt att inte skapa en festkväll med bar och mingel. Det blir snarare en form av ”pop-up-event” som under 38 minuter är sprängfyllt av mode och kultur för att sedan tystna igen och därefter återkomma varje säsong för att växa sig starkt, berättar Jenny Grettve.

Detta är starten på en modedag som återkommer gång på gång för att bli en av de modescener i Sverige som branschen och modepubliken räknar med. 38 minuter äger rum hos Mitt Möllan, som omvandlar före detta Leonard Butiksgata på Claesgatan till ett hus för konst, kultur, design och mode.


Var? P-huset Leonard, Claesgatan 6, Malmö den 17 augusti 21.00, insläpp 20.30, begränsat antal platser och gästlista i dörren. OSA på www.38minuter.se

Vad? Jenny Grettve, Ravishing Mad och MAXJENNY skapar en kväll som samlar Malmös invånare och modebranschfolk och visar bredden av Malmös rika kulturutbud.

RAVISHING MAD
Den respekterade tidningen Collezioni Sport and Street utnämnde redan 2008 Ravishing Mad till "reinventor of denim". Höga midjor, draperade silhuetter, målade jeans istället för blekta. Designern och mångkonstnären Anna Österlund har på olika sätt fortsatt att utveckla nyskapande dam- och herrjeans parallellt med en mängd film-, foto- och konstprojekt. Ravishing Mad samarbetar gärna och ofta med musiker, konstnärer och dansare för att både bredda och ifrågasätta vår syn på mode och identitet. Kollektionerna visas på modeveckorna i New York, Paris och Berlin och det första tillfället att se SS-12 är under Stockholms modevecka 9-11 augusti. www.ravishingmad.se  info(at)ravishingmad.se

JENNY GRETTVE
Jenny Grettve visade sin första kollektion i augusti 2010 och sen dess har hon uppmärksammats mycket för sina klassiska plagg med annorlunda skärningar. Jenny är utbildad arkitekt och det syns ofta i hennes sätt att konstruera och tänka kring mode. Märket arbetar för att vara ekologiskt hållbart genom att närproducera och använda alternativa material. Jenny Grettves vår/sommarkollektion 2012 kommer att visas under Stockholm Fashion Week samt i New York i september.  www.jennygrettve.com  info(at)jennygrettve.com

MAXJENNY
MAXJENNY art fashion and style är ett innovativt koncept konstruerat av designern Maxjenny  Forslund. Maxjenny arbetar intuitivt som modedesigner och använder inte traditionella sätt för att komma fram till sin form utan arbetar direkt i tyget och på kroppen. Hon arbetar med metoden direkt drapering -detta tillåter henne att improvisera, följa tygets karaktär och använda dess hela vidd, vilket också medför extremt lite spill. Detta nya sätt att jobba, tänka, hennes spontana säkra bruk av färger och förmågan att ständigt utvecklas framåt i nya material har blivit hennes signum. www.maxjenny.com  info(at)maxjenny.com

WWW.38MINUTER.SE
för mer info, kontakta Anna Österlund +46706064626 info(at)ravishingmad.se

TACK TILL!


hår och smink:
Big Hair Mama - Är en Ekologisk hårsalong på Kristianstadgatan 13b, vid Möllan. Fixar håret på MAXJENNYs modeller.
Matilda Lundahl Genko hårdesign - Håller till på Friisgatan 12, vid Triangeln. Stylar håret på Jenny Grettves modeller.
Blissiz - Ligger på Tessins väg 10c i Slottsstaden och erbjuder dig behandlingar inom hår, hud och kropp i en behaglig miljö under ett och samma tak. Gör hår- och makeup för Ravishing Mad.
Makeupartist Anne Hanson - Arbetar professionellt med alla typer av sminkningar och gör makeup på Jenny Grettves och Maxjennys modeller.

eventdesign:
CTED - Kreativ studio med fokus på möten, utställningar och event. CTED utformar och designar catwalk, ljus och bakgrunder till 38 minuter.

eventteknik:
INFORMATIONSTEKNIK - med kontor i Malmö, Köpenhamn, Århus, Oslo och Stockholm är en av Skandinaviens mest kompletta leverantörer inom audiovisuell kommunikation. Teknikleverantör till 38 minuter. 

lokal:
Mitt Möllan - Omvandlar före detta Leonard Butiksgata på Claesgatan till ett hus för konst, kultur, design och mode.

stolar:
Lunds tältuthyrning - Levererar helvita, stilrena och fräscha tält med den inredning ni behöver. Finns på Järngatan 31 i Lomma och bidrar med stolar till visningen.

dj:
HMWL - House Music With Love är en house-blog av musiker och DJ:s och sköter musiken på visningen.

hemsida:
Truls Bråhammar - Arbetar som webbutvecklare på Inka Interactive i Malmö

video:
Anna Österlund - Har fotat bakgrundsbild och video.
Jenny Grettve - Musik till videon
Camilla Dueholm - Arbetar som koreograf och voguing/waackingdansare i Köpenhamn.
Mary-Anne Buyondo - Modellar och dansar med tyg i videon.

dryck:
Ceethree’s iO - är en unik energikub baserad på grönt kaffe, nyttiga superfrukter och uppiggande örter. iO bjuder på dryck under 38 minuter.

tilltugg:
Larsa Foods - bjuder våra gäster på osten Oriental White, en genuin smakupplevelse från östra Medelhavet. 

modeller:
Epic People - Är en castingagentur som vill ta till vara på människor med karaktär, utstrålning och juste stil i Malmö och Öresundsregionen. Epic People har castat modeller till visningen.

dansare:
Moonwalkers - Malmöbaserad dansgrupp som öppnar 38minuter med uppträdande till dubstep.

Greatest fashion show ever in Malmö - 38 minuter modevisning

I felt someone had to do something about the non existing fashion scene in Malmö...Loads of great brands and designers run their own brands here and show their collections on fashion weeks around the world! But Malmö is a small town without its own fashion week and the designers live here incognito until they suddenly pop up in New York, Paris or Berlin. I have no idea of how it's even possible that this town, that even lacks a proper design school, is filled with so many designers. Anyhow, it was just a matter of time until we got together and did something about it all!

Soo...Jenny Grettve and I decided to show our home audience what they didn't know excisted. We decided to open the SS-12 season together with designer Maxjenny by creating a big fashion show on the same level as we would on our international shows. If you ask me, this is already tradition: let's always open the season at home, no matter where we live!


Jenny, who is also a musician and an architect is used to working with different media and I, who love my camera and have been dancing a whole lot my entire life, got together two weeks ago to film a teaser video together using the sum of all our experience from different art forms.

We asked ourselves: how to show fashion without showing clothes? Easy, it's all about statement and image, fashion is so much more that just clothes. Actually, not showing our collections in this video was more important! You'll have to come to the show to see them!!!

Professional Danish Voguing/Waacking and House dancer Camilla Dueholm came over to Malmö and did her wicked moves in my basement. My basement is a good place, remember the other vid we shot there? And then we met up with cool Mary-Anne Buyondo (who has square hair and is a naturally born dancer without any training which is confusing and enviable) and made her skinny dip in the sea and dance naked in the middle of the night in a huge soccer field.

Jenny made a tune with a cool industrial feel to it and we played it loud and nice in the basement and soccer field locations that night. Yes, I brought giffles from Pågen, I cannot work without them! And I filmed and took snapshots and danced a little. Jenny danced too, it was a fantastic night.


38 minutes fashion - teaser - upcoming show in Malmö from Ravishing Mad on Vimeo.

We talked to a whole bunch of good people and asked them to help us out and now the show is fully sponsored by all the coolest companies in Malmö! We talked to the casting agency Epic People for example and they got us 30 fabulous models, and 3 different hair salons: Blissiz, Big Hair Mama and Genko Hårdesign will close down their businesses that day just to help us out. Yeah baby, and Mitt Möllan let us lend their parking garage emptied from cars (you know I have a blistering weekness for raw environments, right?) My husband Truls who works at Inka made us a homepage, Lunds tältuthyrning got us the chairs, music collective House Music With Love aka the people behind Skandinavia's biggets house and techno blog will dj and set up the sound system, makeup artist Anne Hanson and her crew will do their thing and we got light from Highway ljud och ljus. And even more companies are signing up as I write this post...!

So watch the video and spread the word! And btw, don't forget to rsvp asap, there is a limit to how many we'll let in. WWW.38MINUTER.SE

Model casting in Malmö

Hey, you don't have to be an experienced model as long as you are gorgeous in any odd or obvious way and think this would be a lot of fun!

We're arranging some majorly bigly and cool-ey fashion shows in Malmö in August and need loads of models, if you're over 173 cm tall, send me an e-mail at info[at]ravishingmad.se to book your casting on the 1'st of August and don't forget to slip me a headshot, your size and length! Oh, and we still need to book a few more makeup artists and hair stylists for both events...please send me a link to your online portfolio if your interested!

Documentary about fashion

Sally Levi behind the film production company Film Trolley and Swedish Film/TV producer Peter Wirén recently asked me for an interview for their exciting new project called After a Fashion. A documentary about fashion and identity featuring two girls, Sally and Elsa, travelling to India, Sweden and USA to explore how identity creates fashion or vice versa. By visiting different cultures like a nudist camp, Sami inuites, and letting an Indian princess switching places with an Indian shopgirl, they ask themselves  whether personal expression can be either oppressed or enhanced through fashion and how differently people are received depending on what they wear.

Their journey is supported by interviews with people with different takes on fashion and that's where I come in together with Roger Dell from The Farnsworth Museum and Harvard University, Indian fashion designer Ritu Kumar, and American fashion designers Christian Joy and Ralph Lauren.

Ravishing Mad in Faction Mag

Our SS-11 photoshoot with Caleb Eike Smith is now published in the Kansas City based fashion magazine FACTION!

Open publication - Free publishing - More carman stalker

Last year I took Mårten with me on a road trip from Malmö to Stockholm. In June it was, no maybe it was in July, I can’t remember anymore, but it was on a Friday. He brought his tiny guitar and played for the other cars driving by on the highway, and eleven stone Buddhas. I brought some potato and chicken with little red dots that put us into hypochondria mood for at least the following 24 hours. I also brought the collection and a very old pair of welding goggles.

The six hour drive took nine hours cause we didn’t bring any car nazi to tell us not to stop at least once an hour. But that was not a problem, Mårten took his DJing task very seriously on my crappy stereo, and played bands like Pixies and Suicide. Frankie Teardrop was with us the whole time and is part of my crowd now.

We slept at a friend’s place when we got to Stockholm. But before we went to sleep, Mårten lined up his Buddhas on the table. It was for our protection he said. The morning after, when the sun was already unbearably hot, we both got into our striped ass-door jumpsuits that we designed together just days earlier. It was the first time I co-designed with him, always kept that process to myself before. So we went into the woods looking snazzy, Mårten in his white framed shades and me in my shutter goggles. Sat down on a perfectly placed carpet-beating rack in the semi-shade. I trimmed his hair off and we then rushed to the nearest gas station to buy coffee and cinnamon Gifflar. We lived on those ultimate ugly-buns. Never ever trying too hard to please, ugly and flat, impeccable taste.

Few moments later, at Caleb's place, we had some more of those necessities before we packed the car with everything we’d need for the next day and night. Caleb in his magic boots with his cameras and pieces of cardboard. Mårten, all he needs is the hello kitty guitar and his fags. I bought more Gifflar, and the collection was already back in the trunk. We had no plan, we drifted from place to place all over Stockholm, and knew we had to end it all 30 hours later.

Caleb told us about a place he knew under a bridge. We walked for a long time and climbed through a fence, that only our slim bodies could be squeezed through, then down on a ledge at the bottom of the rock wall right by the channel where all the boats passed by. We waved at some of them and eventually found ourselves under the big rumbling bridge. The bright sun reflected on the water and threw a surreal light into our cathedral. A foot road lead from the bridge abutment and as we spotted it we realized that our little adventure was rather banal. But that magic concrete palace became our home for a few hours, we explored every inch of it. Climbing up on secret shelves, retiring at the top of a crossbar, chasing each other in the gravel. I sprained my ankle, and from a nearby restaurant Caleb got ice that we attached to the foot with Mårten’s old mesh hospital t-shirt. It didn’t matter, we lived in a magic world now.


I knew of another bridge leading over polluted water from an industrial area and shipping port, to a beautiful green island. In the sunset it seemed like the end of the world. We were the last survivors and the evening breeze started to get cold. Stepped into the sea in those wonderful jumpsuits. The cold water did wonders to my ankle and I tried not to fall on the slippery stones.

Back at Caleb's apartment we met Hanna and while we waited for total darkness, she unpacked her wonderful jewellery that she kept in a very old brown suitcase. We were all in a rather quiet and almost manic, bordering to apathetic mood, and floated in time. Suddenly the darkness was there and we walked to The Hole.

Caleb had passed it by a hundred times before and was always fascinated by it, but never went down into it before. The Hole he found at the corner of a park right by the street, a fence hid an overgrown staircase leading deeply down to an old bomb shelter closed by an enormous metal door with hinges larger than our heads. We walked up and down the stairs, barely talking occasionally, and sometimes resting on the railing. Tried not to burn ourselves on the nettles. Hanna dressed us with her heavy jewellery and we didn’t even bother to mind that it was pretty fucking cold wearing only the draped mesh garments. Caleb folded his cardboard pieces into different shapes of interesting looking cylinders and taped them onto the flash to steer it’s light.

We were all eager to catch the sunrise as it started to get lighter around maybe two in the morning. At an empty parking lot by the containers in the shipping port we saw the first light of a cloudy day and we didn’t say a word. Caleb’s arms were aching and he started shooting from the hip. Hanna fell asleep in the car and Mårten couldn’t find his fags. I had some more painkillers.

Neither of us wanted to stop and there was no one there to tell us when enough was enough. But at five, the memory card was full and we got four hours of sleep back at the apartment.

When we woke up, Caleb made pancakes, and photographed us all over again in the basement of the artist collective he’s a part of. We threw balls at each other, screamed, leaped through the air the highest we could, did just anything that crossed our minds. And Caleb shot from his hip.

See the whole collection here and click on Spring/Summer -11.

Don't speak softly

A while ago I started posting random photos that I like...on yet another tumblr blog...I call it Don't Speak Softly.

What is fashion?

Some time ago someone asked / probably stated that I wasn't really that into fashion, right? -I guess...was my answer, the so called question confused me. Actually I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a very thought through question or even a dare. It was merely a try to converse and maybe that’s why it didn’t trig me and I let it be. What annoys me now is thinking of it long time after, I don’t like that lame excuse for an answer.

Calling myself a fashion designer yet possibly not being into fashion is a hell of a contradiction. I’m seemingly spending most of my time making fashion so I ought to like it… I mean, you know me! There is no stolidity connected to anything that I do even in the simplest everyday doings. I care all the time about everything and anything and it’s moving me fast forward under fun circumstances. But you’ve got a point: I don’t talk much about clothes…However I am into fashion but we fucking define it differently you and I.

Materializing feelings, extending my personality into visual is what I do and when I choose to use the body as my forum or canvas I call it fashion. Fashion and style as a form of self-expression and clothes as one of my tools. I have an urge to mold my feelings and thoughts into shapes that are touchable and concrete. My inside needs to be visualized in order for me not to burst. It’s an emotional and stubborn mind that keeps me so busy thinking and feeling that it would be a shame to waste it or to let it destroy me instead of profiting on it in some way. I sometimes put them into spoken words, or poems and lyrics, and sometimes into sketches and photos, structures…and clothes.

Clothes in general often don't inspire me much, I find it excruciatingly boring to browse for “must haves”, today's outfit or being told what seasonal colours every wardrobe needs. That’s just a commercial trick and something used to profit on people’s insecurities and possibly the worst side of the fashion industry.

What inspires me is the language we are able to speak through the way we dress. When I start creating a collection, work on sketches, or for that sake deciding what to wear today, I don’t think in garments I think in concepts, silhouettes, and social markers. Just as a thought can be put into music and sounds and be listened to, fashion is to me an expression used on the body visible for the world to see, judge or love. Portraying my inside on my outside, I get to choose which part of myself to show or hide. I think of it as a power tool that allows me to constantly reinvent myself. Buying a dictated outfit in the seasonal colour doesn’t interest me, hence an interest for clothes doesn’t always equal an interest for fashion. I love the language of fashion, not talking about clothes.

Shootin'

 I shot some pics of model Otto Lundbladh in various Ravishing Mad clothes the other day, just for fun...check out more and follow me on tumblr!

Men's jeans to die for

He fell head over heels for these Ravishing Mad drop crotch jeans called Marv and jumped into them right away!


The outlet continues every Saturday in May 2011 at Mitt Möllan hours 12-4 pm at Clasgatan 8 in Malmö Sweden.