The Tamesis
Petra Fagerström completed her collection just in time for figure skater Alysa Liu’s stunning performance to win gold at the Winter Olympics, which was a pure twist of fate—triple axel, really. Fagerström, a Swedish designer who made her London Fashion Week debut last year after graduating from an MA at Central Saint Martins, has a concrete memory of competing on the ice as a child prodigy.
“It’s surreal to see it all happening at the same time,” she lamented after musing on the style and character of female coaches. “I was a figure skater in Gothenburg from the age of five or six until I was 16, and then I gave it up when I got into fashion, making clothes.” In her opinion, she focused on combining “outerwear and shiny things — that’s really my aesthetic, my language. You see a lot of fun stuff on the rink, like what my coach wore. It was always an all-white or all-black Moncler with furry boots.”
For her CSM MA show, Fagerström established a strange and compelling dialogue between old-school haute couture silhouettes and artificial intelligence. Her “double front” jacket, an iconic design from fall, emerged due to an artificial intelligence glitch when it couldn’t tell the difference between a Dior Bar jacket and a thick coat. Regardless: the interior structure and allure of a winter puffer fish happen to look very desirable. So did the combination of thermals with shimmering sequined dresses and outerwear, with strange lenticular mirages appearing on Fagerström’s printed pleats and then disappearing again. (The fake furry trim is made from Biofluff, a natural fiber product.)
The models’ haughty posture—they stood in a row facing the catwalk, looking critically at everyone who walked past them—suggested Fagerström’s deeper psychological musings on the dynamics of coaching skating. Her initial inspiration board inevitably featured a lot of Tonya Harding imagery; glimpses of floral bodysuits she once wore were replicated in rose and hydrangea tapestry prints on coats and jackets (all of which were highly desirable). Still, Fagerstrom made it clear in her press release that she wanted to disprove the myth of the toxic mother coach. “I wanted this series to come from a perspective that sympathized with her, rather than belittling her.” But that didn’t stop her from naming the series “After Everything I Did For You.”
But looking at the excitement of skating at the Olympics, does Fagerstrom find himself missing out entirely? “I did — partially,” she admitted with a smile. “But it’s actually very similar to the feeling of making a collection. It’s like skating on ice: the speed, the feeling of being so powerful feels really good. It’s a very brutal sport, but at the same time it has this flow where you’re kind of floating and there’s an incredible feeling of growth.” In the long run, the training of athletes could be good practice for the fashion industry. The same is true in the short term. Fagerström attracted widespread attention with his earliest fashion shows and was selected as one of this year’s designers by Paul Smith’s Residency. This provided her with free studio space and business guidance (her shows were held at Collective Studios in Smithfield Market.)
In a few days, she will also compete in the first round of the LVMH Prize at the Paris showroom. It’s already very confusing.
