Many designers are exploring the dark side this fall, but none have dared to go as far—and so low—as Avavav’s Beate Skonare Karlsson. At the show for her collection, The Hole, models, some bloodied, others with bony skeleton hands, emerged from a dirt pit like corpses rising from the grave into a darkened room. Whether this was an example of resurrection or a rebellion of the undead—or both—is up to the viewer, but it’s clear the designer was exploring new territory.
Karlsson is a digital native with a knack for staging viral shows, which have, to some extent, been commentaries on the digital age. Fall 2024, for example, was a study on group psychology. There were a few plants seated in the audience to start the action, and gloves and garbage were made accessible to guests. The idea, the designer said at the time, was to “see if people would [when prompted] interact and start throwing things; kind of stoning-the-witch actions.” They did.
Many design elements in this collection were built on what came before (the proportions, street influence, cutouts), but this was a unique offering because it looked inward. This time the design process was deeply personal. “I’ve been feeling weak in my body in a way that I’ve never experienced before,” said the designer on a call. “And then I just thought, Let’s go into the darkness of it all.” So she cued up the melancholy music she used to listen to as a teenager (“Shoreline” by Broder Daniel was the soundtrack for the show) and resurrected her fascination with emo and goth aesthetics.
Correspondingly, the palette was mostly black and red, with some pops of cerulean and a “centipede” scarf with all-around fringe in a muddy brown. Karlsson further developed the skeleton-like slashing she’s experimented with before and made prints to evoke an “X-ray kind of world.” From the goth world came the almost Victorian skirts—greatly shortened and buoyed by voluminous and kawaii ruffles. These were shown with tailored jackets with garter-like tabs at the front. There were also slashed car-wash skirts, a sweet and sassy use of bows, and a “pregnant” model in sweats (wearing a prosthetic acquired from SVT, the Swedish television service), all of which suggested that one of the designer’s areas of interest was feminine expressions of frailty and fortitude.
If an expectant woman suggested the cycle of life, a more ghoulish figure in a puffer vest with a hunchback silhouette suggested an undead angle (versus resurrection, a much more common theme in Catholic Italy). One wonders if the second look, a padded-shoulder satin shirt, tie, and pinstriped pants, will give rise to an undertaker-core trend.
Avavav’s collaboration with Adidas continued this season, yielding ready-to-wear and two new sneaker styles, the clownish Moonrubber Megaride with a sculpted, transparent “moon goo” sole, and a remix of the Superstar, the toe cap based on the anatomy of a foot. Karlsson wanted to merge goth and street (see the brand’s best-selling scrunch-hemmed sweats and wide jeans), “because I haven’t really seen that,” and then introduce a sports element. That was most powerfully done at the end of the show, where American football gear was transformed into a kind of defensive armor.
One model, wearing a jersey that read “Loser,” paused to make the L sign. It’s difficult to dissociate football references from American high school movies, and while the designer had been looking back to those angst-filled years, there was a sense of maturity here as well (alongside tacky trompe l’oeil prints of jackets, shirts, and ties, which wittily tapped into the office siren theme of the season). The collection was built on a contemplation of grown-up subjects like life and death, vulnerability and power, the fragility of the fleeting body and the solid evidence of life offered by bones. In a seeming sign of strength and perseverance, Karlsson took her bow wearing Wednesday Addams braids. Touché.
