Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter for the latest luxury news and insights, plus exclusive membership discounts.
Johanna Parv admits that she receives one recurring negative feedback from buyers: “They say, ‘When I pass your collection on the rail, I don’t really notice it.’ So I’m like, ‘OK, but let me just show you how it feels.’ Because my clothes are about user experience. I’m not about making some flowery costumes just to be noticed.”
Despite that, Parv absolutely has been noticed. Supported by the British Fashion Council’s Newgen incubation programme, the Estonia-born designer, 31, will make her show debut on the London Fashion Week schedule next Monday morning. That milestone follows three seasons of excellent presentations via non-profit Fashion East, at one of which Vogue chief critic Sarah Mower hailed her for “powerfully fusing function, feminism and chic”.
Simplistically put, Parv’s USP is that she designs womenswear for cyclists who are defined neither solely by being cyclists nor solely by being women. Her clothing is realised in technical materials — Dyneema, wool ripstop and water-repellent linens — and includes pragmatic functionalities that allow the garments to transform through the use of zippers, pockets and other features according to user need. Free movement is paramount.
“Having this opportunity to work with the support of Newgen is wonderful,” says Parv. “We are at a vulnerable point so it is extremely important to be on this big stage.” Her show will reflect that user-experiential ethos: as they walk, the models will also show off the garments’ multiple functionalities. “Because it’s not about a final look and it’s about more than just image. These clothes have many ways to be,” she adds.
So far, so functional. Yet parallel with technicity, Parv also applies the twist that truly transports her clothes from bike lane to boardroom — and way beyond. She says she first became seriously engaged with feminism via the porn director flatmate (long story) with whom she bunked in Paris’s Bonne-Nouvelle, during a year of working internships at Dior and Balenciaga. Combined with a passion for cycling, discovered through “being so poor and needing to get around” while completing her foundation and BA courses at Central Saint Martins (CSM), this morphed into an MA collection that mashed the Edwardian attire of the UK’s suffrage movement with references to bicycling (whose adoption by women proved simultaneously subversive).
“It was literally about female power, liberation and freedom,” she recalls. Upon graduation, Parv decided to fast forward her subject matter and central themes from that vintage starting point to now. “It was a case of how can I do this in a contemporary way that applies to me and my friends? How can I define this spirit now?”
One stand-out element in Parv’s practice is the upcycled leather handbags by London company Ackery (Margaret Thatcher’s favourite) that she grafts into her pieces through the addition of strapping and the fashioning of bespoke pockets in companion garments. These mid-century fossils (Parv says she prefers to work with pieces from the ’50s and before due to their superior quality and hardiness) retain their vestigial conventional femininity in a manner that catalyses the perception of her garments, and which also remain functionally useful. She has further developed accessory designs of her own that meld boxy, trad-looking compartments with sleekly utilitarian strapping in order to make handbags hands-free in previously unexplored ways.
Clothing designs include tops that, at first glance, look pretty straightforwardly ‘activewear’, but whose kangaroo pockets and zippered darting play alongside a scalloped cutaway sleeve that echoes 1940s couture. While the designer’s ‘Velocity’ trousers, whose cyclist-friendly cinched cuffs, Dyneema toughness and articulated knees recall ’70s ski pants, are cut with a tailored rigour that would allow them to serve without any stretch of the imagination as evening wear. Parv tends to reject aesthetic detail for its own sake — “because then it’s just a story” — instead applying pattern pragmatically via silicon dots designed to deliver grip and purchase. She says: “I feel that there are a lot of references in fashion that are over-romanticised and overused without anyone considering whether they have any meaning to anyone now.”
Despite those reservations about ‘hanger appeal’, Parv’s nascent stockist network includes Visit For (Osaka), Boon The Shop (Seoul), Absolutely Fabrics (Toronto), H Lorenzo (LA), Ikram (Chicago) and Vibe TWLV (New York). Parv is also stocked at six Dover Street Market outposts: at its Ginza store, she reports, some of her collection hangs on the menswear floor. Her subtly rescaled pieces in larger sizes, labelled unisex, are performing well.
Parv first came to London in 2011, aged 18, to take part in a CSM summer course she hoped would help improve her English before further study in Estonia. Instead, she says her tutor in London urged her to return full-time to do the foundation year. “I was so excited. When I returned home, I was like, ‘Mum, I know what I want to do!’” And because she had spent the previous three years juggling her schooling with a starring role in a TV series named Ühikarotid — “it was kind of like Estonian Skins” — she was able to pay for it herself.
That willingness to radically change direction when either opportunity or impediment appears, is useful in both cycling and life, more broadly. Parv says: “I’m about being constantly in practice, with no shame. We move as people, and I want to always be questioning and always be excited about what I do. I’m even excited sometimes to think maybe I could start a business in something else completely.”
In the crowded rack outside of her studio, there are two bikes belonging to Parv. Her Vanmoof electric is out of action (just like mine), while a well-loved custom-build from Hackney Cycles, all-matte-black but with a little scarlet tag under the saddle, is her daily ride. “If I don’t have my bike, I get anxious,” she says. Central to the beauty of the bicycle is its functional efficiency in transferring human energy into forward propulsion. End purpose is central to Parv’s work, too, in tandem with her embedded personal ethos: in combination, they generate a functional and feminocentric design that signposts a new direction between fashion and sportswear.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
Glenn Martens steps down as creative director of Y/Project
Haider Ackermann is named creative director of Tom Ford
‘The instinct to empower is the same’: Astrid Andersen on her return to fashion
