Good night, bad night…whatever it is, Ann-Sofie Back will not go gentle into it. From 1998 to 2018, the Swedish designer forged her own path with a brave approach to design that combined personal biography and a deliberate contrariness, taking on norms often relating to women’s looks, and big topics that she found distasteful such as religion, sex, and violence. The resulting collections were rich in details (like pearls wedged between skin and hose; chewing-gum covered shoes), interesting pattern-making, and meaning. Of her process, Back told me, “It’s quite simple, I look for an inspiration that will not bore me. Resolution is boring, it’s the end. It doesn’t matter if I go deep on a subject or if I scratch the surface as long as I think it gives me good design ideas.” Working this way also allows Back to discover beauty where there usually is none.
From November 7 it will be possible to see what beauty Back found in “Go as You Please,” an exhibition of her work opening in Stockholm at Liljevalchs museum. Before getting into the show, a bit of Back-ground might be useful. The designer was born in Stenhamra, a “boring” suburb of Stockholm, where she despaired of her parents’ lack of style. As a child, Back’s sense of not fitting in was partly related to her wardrobe, which she found wanting. As a Gaultier-clad young adult she stuck out in another way.
After completing a degree at Beckman’s College of Design, Back earned her Masters at Central Saint Martins, Upon graduating in 1998, she worked as a stylist, designed for other labels, including Acne Studios, and was tapped as a creative director at Cheap Monday, a position she held from 2009-2017. Back presented her first eponymous collection in Paris in 2001; from 2005 she showed in London and divided her business into two lines Ann-Sofie Back Atelje and the more commercial Back. Four years later she moved back to Sweden in 2009. In 2018 the ever-resourceful designer came up against a force she couldn’t vanquish—her creditors—and the business went into bankruptcy.
For Back, “Go As You Please,” is a way to find closure. “When it opens,” she said on a walkthrough, “I’m going to feel I’m done, it’s done, and I’ve summarized it in a way that I like and now I can let it rest.” Respite is something that has eluded Back, who has been tested in Job-like ways in the past few years. “An important relationship ended, I had to put my company in bankruptcy, four people in my family died, I got cancer, and my dog died in a horrible accident while I was in surgery. I lost everything,” she told me. “It was like hell. These last years have been a lot about death and going to funerals, throwing other people’s things away and keeping keepsakes and it has just been horrible.”
One day an image of a burning mannequin popped into Back’s mind, and this, combined with her personal trials, helped establish the framework of the death-themed exhibition. “Go as You Please,” she determined, would be a personal goodbye to fashion and a commentary that fashion is destroying the earth. “It’s not just me and my personal drama…. It’s a bit drama-queen to stage your funeral,” she admits.
Back’s black humor remains intact. The invitation to the new exhibition takes the form of a Swedish death announcement. When Vogue Scandinavia’s Robert Ryberg, who worked closely with Back for many years (and who appears with her in the satirical 2023 film, A Triangle of Sadness), posted it on his Instagram, people started sending him condolence messages, which Back found hilarious. Reflecting on his friend’s practice, Ryberg said, “She has this need to be a disturbance to the force somehow. I’m so happy for her.”
“Fashion has never been about fun subjects for me ever, really,” says Back. This is a point that the exhibition underlines from the get-go; the first thing visitors see as they enter the space up some stairs is a granite tombstone on which will be projected the names of people who have been in some way involved with the brand. That’s as retrospective as the show gets. The exhibition is about death, “but even if you don’t agree, it’s also about resurrection,” said stylist Nicole Walker who curated the show with Back. “It’s rebirth, because what we’re creating here, it’s something from the past [that’s presented] in a completely new way.”
Entering a large white painted room to the left of the tombstones, visitors encounter mannequins standing in girl gangs. Others lay on gleaming silver metal gurneys that add a cold, clinical element to what otherwise is a happy chaos. Chronology is entirely discarded in favor of a cross-generational dialogue with Walker. Pieces from Back’s graduation collection might be paired with something from the mid-00s, and garments are repurposed, so a coat might be worn as a skirt, for example. “I know it sort of takes attention from the design details, but I don’t care,” Back said. “Nothing in the exhibition is shown as it was styled back then, it is all new looks on the mannequins and in the coffins.”
A straightforward retrospective—a straightforward anything—is not Back’s style. She might not be producing fashion anymore, but she’s still tilting at windmills. Some of the mannequins wear white plastic masks of Back’s face. This “has different meanings,” she explained. “It’s me working on acceptance of what I look like; it’s like if I’m scared of funerals, then I have to work with funerals. If I’m scared of my own look, I have to kind of make it neutral for myself. And this is one way of doing that.”
Another “take down” is of traditional (skinny, white) beauty ideals. This is accomplished by the burning of the mannequins, and the distortion of silhouettes through the use of padding and stuffing. The treatment of the mannequins, says Back, is a “commentary on the state of the world, the fashion industry burning clothes in Africa, and me burning an old patriarchal female beauty standard. Fashion is a commentary on the world and fashion that exists in a bubble is to me irrelevant.”
That said, it’s the personal touches that add depth to this exhibition, which, though it represents two decades of work, is not especially nostalgic (which is quite a feat in my book). There is great poignancy here, too. In cleaning out her father’s house, Back found a little troll, which she has tucked into a pair of tights like a little amulet. Some of her vast collection of fridge magnets has been repurposed as brooches, and a photo of her first, unrequited love (mustachioed and astride a motorbike) is incorporated into the show. So is a painting her mother did of Jesus which has been made into a dress. All of this is in keeping with the sense of the “ordinary” that Back has pursued as consistently as “bad” taste.
Selects from Ann-Sofie Back Atelje and Back collections on Vogue Runway.
As I see it, the takeaway from the exhibition will be that Back was (too) ahead of her time. Her work isn’t well documented and will be new to many, but also familiar. Many visitors will understand her work through designers who have come after her, like Demna (at Vetements and Balenciaga), All-in, Hodakova, Vaquera. “The last four years I’ve seen a picture of her layered sunglasses on 15 different mood boards,” said Walker. “But I think nobody knows that they’re Ann-Sofie’s.” In this time when niche fashion is tracked like sports, a new collecting area will open up. One of the distinguishing features of Back’s work is its nuanced sense of humor. The in-jokeness also seems related to the brand’s true IYKYK status. Failed glamour is how Back describes her aesthetic. “No heterosexual man is liking what I do, ever,” she says wryly. “But it is also true that if you wear my clothes, it could be seen like you’re ridiculing yourself a bit, and that’s not something that’s easily sellable, because most people want to become better through their clothes, more perfect, more attractive and sexy. For me, that’s too boring and easy. I need to play with that vanity.” Later in the conversation she notes, “it’s a bit like if you meet that person [wearing Back]; you don’t know if they know what they’re doing or not. Is it someone who is fashionable or is it a mistake?” That in-betweenness, the space in which two things can be true, where the good shoulder angel engages with the bad one, is where Back is most alive. “I don’t want it to be easy to read my designs. I want to cause confusion because I’m confused and I changed my mind,” said Back. “Ambivalence is very important; I don’t see things as so black and white.”
Says Anders Edström, the Swedish photographer and filmmaker, and Back’s closest partner in crime: “It feels like Ann-Sofie turns all of her weaknesses into strengths by facing them, accepting them and using them for her work. She laughs at her own embarrassment. The thought of people scratching their heads makes her laugh. She embraces her own failures. She quickly accepts when things don’t turn out as she’d thought they would and tries to see something interesting in them. She’s brutally honest but she is a very funny person. When I look at things she has made I can hear her giggling in my head.” The two returned to Back’s hometown with archival pieces and models who they worked with over the years to create images that are on show in the exhibition. Some of them, explains Edström, will also be published in Self-Service magazine, “who suggested for us to meet for the first time, in March, 1998.”
“Ann-Sofie cannot do anything the easy way; it’s impossible for her,” says Walker. “In the Swedish press they always write that she’s complicated or things like this; I don’t know how many men [they would] portray that way.” The Swedish stylist Naomi Itkes also sees Back as a force. “She was looking at everything like an anthropologist, looking at society and people. And she brought up topics like feminism, paparazzi, horror in American culture. She took in everything. She’s like the Cindy Sherman of fashion…. In the times that we’re in, Ann-Sofie is going to have a value to us, to the industry in her sideways approach, her uncompromising ways….”
“Go as You Please,” reveals Back to be one of the most undead of designers. In rejecting resolution, her imagination never comes to rest; on the contrary, it’s kinetic. In that sense the Liljevalchs exhibition is a rollicking roll in the grave.
