The pandemic has uprooted our routines, restricted our movements, and called attention to the environmental crisis. In response, there is a longing for safety and comfort. Linus van Pelt found that in a security blanket. In Oslo—where a three-day digital fashion week kicked off today—that idea has been given a fashionable and responsible spin by Elisabeth Stray Pedersen, who specializes in blanket coats with her line ESP.
ESP has been operative in its current incarnation since 2015 when Pedersen bought the Lillunn company. Lillunn was started by a woman named Unn Søiland Dale—who worked with Hubert de Givenchy and Christian Dior, among others—in 1955, a year after Linus’s blanket made its first appearance, as it happens. Dale started out by focusing on handknits, and in the 1970s started creating wool coats that were well-made, warm, and good-looking. Pedersen’s aim, in 2015 as now, was to evolve the brand’s core product in a way that spoke to a new generation who are looking to dress responsibility.
The label offers many guilt-free options. Among Pedersen’s goals are “trying to work as local as possible and knowing the value chain and everyone involved.” ESP collaborates with ribbon- and thread-makers from the mountain regions of Dovre and Romsdalen, Norway, but local wool is the basis of most of what Pedersen does. The material she works with comes, according to a company statement, “from the crossbred sheep that have been walking freely in the highlands around Gol in Norway.” The wool meets Nordic Ecolabel standards and is Woolmark-certified and from it Pedersen makes pieces like reversible coats, cozy scarves, and other garments that are often adapted from existing patterns and made using traditional craft techniques.
Pedersen incorporated upcycling into her practice for fall 2020, which gave her not only the opportunity to work with new materials, like leather, but also to add texture to her designs. Using scraps from her own factory, Pedersen created a stand-out patchwork sweater this season as well. “I wanted to stop and just try to improve everything we were already doing,” the designer says. She sees her inclination to slow down as fitting into a larger collective desire of people to adapt to a new pace “and repairing and taking care of things they have, and [focusing on] what’s important in your life.” For Pedersen, that includes exploring nature. “Because of the COVID situation,” she notes, “everyone here in Norway has been going out in nature and everyone kind of became campers.”
The designer explores the connection in the “artsy” (her description) film she made to present during the fashion days in Oslo. The camera follows the biking and foraging expedition of local brewers Vanessa Krogh and Cornelia Øiestad, who believe “there is no waste, only opportunity.” The idea, explains Pedersen, was “to show our values through their eyes.”
