They came out swinging and glittering with rambunctious multi-frilled confidence from head to toe. The set-up at Chopova Lowena was a rousing celebration—and a radical reclamation—of American cheerleader culture, triumphantly stomping around a community hall in west London.
Earlier, the designers Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena had set out the ground rules on a Zoom call from their studio. “Cheer and football was a very big theme that involved a lot of us reflecting on high school. Healing our traumas through making clothes,” Chopova related. Then she added added as the two laughed in unison, “we were attracted to the cheerleader stereotype and her outfit and her uniform. She was, in parts, our bully, but also in parts our friend.”
Mixed up in the adolescent exuberance was another element—the elaborate black, pleated, and embellished folk costumes of the southern Bulgarian Greek Karakachani people. But really, this “cheerlore” collection was about the pair going to town on their familiar knife-pleated skirts and carabiners and giving it all a wildly elaborated haberdashery twist. The intensely layered appliqués turned sweaters, leggings, and bloomers entirely into pile-ups of pastel-colored trimmings: bows on top of lace ruffles, alternating with pink plastic danglers and glinting lurex stripes.
The techniques took on grommeted football lacing and jersey football shoulders, and disarmed them with an excess of what Chopova called “frouffy” girlishness. “At one point, linebacker shoulder pads were displaced as hip panniers and smothered over fluffy floral brocade like a mini Marie Antoinette dress. “We really loved that part of it—it felt like reclaiming our bullies’ outfits,” she laughed.
Meanwhile, with the exploration of the their disparate themes, she said, “we wanted to do these dresses, which almost like splice these references together in a very literal way.” The results were composite dresses zippered together in flouncy layers, intersected with all manner of belts and buckles: multiple garment options in one piece. At other moments, the pastels and neons gave way to goth-y, amazingly decorated, intersected chainmail and festoonings of silver metal jewelry.
With the addition of metal-link and safety-pin jewelry, more iterations of their fake fur earphone bags, and steel-cage waterbottle carriers it was a festival of things for rebellious girls to buy into. Without doubt the most impressively elaborated collection they’ve ever made, the fun and the fury of it carried the message the pair wrote in their press release: “A rallying cry for weird girls everywhere—we are rooting for you!”
