“Sending wishes and prayers.” Online this phrase is often used as an example of how disparate words and actions can be. In contrast, when Elisabet Stamm titled her spring 2025 collection Best Wishes, she did so with no irony or ulterior motive. This is a woman who wears her heart on her sleeve, and is open about her struggles and triumphs. Her collection notes took the form of a letter addressed to the Youth, and her beloved son Svante and his friends opened the show by setting three baskets of carrier pigeons free to fly back to their homes.
Stamm is still trying to find her place in fashion. She’s not a novice in the industry, but her brand is just two years old. This show, her fourth, was presented on a rooftop basketball court in a newly built, somewhat soulless-feeling area outside the city center, but the designer and her friends brought the love. The audience and the cast were among the most diverse of the week, and despite the heat, die-hards were sporting the label’s signature outsized jackets, which combine sport and streetwear influences.
She continues to build out her denim offering, experimenting with printing and washes that reference her truck driver-father’s grease-stained pants (see the low-waisted ones that are held up with a ribbon that replicates the exposed side thong look). The opening ensemble—a simple butter-yellow tee and gray washed jeans with a slightly lower crotch and fullness in the leg, worn with slouchy gaiter boots—had an attitude of indelible cool. The denim in the second look built on the elephant-leg jeans of her last collection, only this season’s have a double, dropped waist and an asymmetric wrap.
Denim and nylon toppers were the heroes of a collection. Tops bedazzled with the word “guilty” looked Bebe-ish although the sentiment was sincere, and in part, referenced Stamm’s efforts to find a work/life balance. Elsewhere, the short-shorts and bra tops presented a sexier image than in the past. Lacking the flow of earlier seasons, this wasn’t a slam dunk collection, but Stamm, a rare woman designer specializing in street wear, always keeps things real: She wrote that she “worked with an equal balance of ‘Bless You / Fuck You’ energy.”
