Editor’s Note: CNN Style is one of the official media partners of Paris Fashion Week. See all coverage here.
Paris
CNN
—
Cate Blanchett has never worn so much silver. Not in the sense of glitzy sequins or hand-applied crystals (par for the course on the red carpet) but the kind of sterling normally found in one’s cutlery drawer. Last April, Blanchett appeared in Vogue China wearing a corset made out of two antique silver platters. With her hair bobbed and blown-out at the ends, she looked like a 1950s Joan of Arc — the ornate serving dishes folded around her torso like rudimentary body armour. That same summer, Blanchett made headlines when she arrived at an LA red carpet in a halter-neck top fashioned out of 102 vintage silver spoons. Before the year came to a close, the cereal utensil was repurposed once more: at the Toronto Film Festival in September, they were used as a peek-a-boo detail, hemming the black blazer that Blanchett wore like a metallic fringe.
This fusion of tableware-turned-couture was the work of Ellen Hodakova Larsson, a Swedish designer and the founder of four-year-old independent Stockholm-based brand Hodakova. And it’s not just the kitchen that Larsson finds inspiring. So far, she has made dresses out of leather briefcases, baguette bags out of belt buckles, and clutch purses from equestrian riding boots.
Her treasure trove of household items are largely donated from stores and businesses across Sweden. “We do collaborations with different companies that provide us with materials they’re overstocking,” she told CNN. Speaking after her Paris Fashion Week show on Thursday, where Larsson presented clothing transformed from guitar strings and other musical instruments, she explained: “It always starts with an intuitive mood, being open-eyed. If something speaks to you and you feel it, I just follow the intuition and trust the process.”
Born during the pandemic, Hodakova has a distinct celebrity client roster that reads as a who’s who of Hollywood’s most sartorially daring — from Tilda Swinton, Greta Lee and Lady Gaga to Emma Corrin, Saoirse Ronan and Julia Fox. Larsson’s avant-garde approach to upcycling also won her the prestigious 2024 LVMH Prize, which included €400,000 and a year’s worth of mentorship with the luxury conglomerates’ executives. “It’s the first time we have seen a project about sustainability that has numbers, that she (Hodakova) sells,” LVMH judge and Dior’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri told Vogue at the time. “We want to recognize these important results.”
The term ‘upcycling’ — first coined in 1994 by German engineer Reiner Pliz — has been a familiar part of environmental conversations for the last 30 years. But Larssons’ interpretation feels fresh. She designs exclusively with discarded items, almost never starting from scratch, since her raw materials already tend to be fully formed items: ribbon rosettes, ballpoint pens, watch faces or paper envelopes. “You put something in a different room, use it in a different way, it affects how you see something,” said Larsson, who repurposes objects without altering their original shape.
In Hodakova’s world, anything can become luxurious — even the mundane. “I’m hoping to change the perspective of (these items),” said Larsson.
Growing up in the Swedish countryside on a horse farm, Larsson’s family home had a make and mend attitude. They grew their own food and chopped their own wood, while Larsson’s mother fashioned clothes out of fabric scraps for her and her brother. A new garment wasn’t bought, but created with some handy reworking. It’s this resourcefulness that threads together the Hodakova universe.
Hodakova’s most individual items — such as a dress made from a wax jacket turned inside out, worn by Saorsie Ronan to the recent New York screening of “The Outrun” — can only be bought directly from the label’s website, where it notes that the garments are made “on-demand” in roughly 3 weeks and may “vary slightly.” Meanwhile, more commercially wearable pieces can be purchased off the rail at one of Larsson’s 24 global stockists, which include Dover Street Market and Ssense.
In Larsson’s latest collection, trousers were the garment du jour; they were reimagined as floor-length gowns, double-breasted coats with peter-pan collars and even nun wimples. Each trouser waistband, whether it had found new purpose as a coat sleeve or a dress neckline, still came complete with a belt. “I love trousers,” said Larsson by way of explanation. There were also bulbous fur coats made out of a patchwork of jettisoned pelt hats, Medusa-style dresses decorated with belts springing outwards like serpents (causing some models to stumble), and jackets repurposed from leather pants.
Amid a global luxury downturn where several shoppers have tightened their purse strings, many designers have opted to prioritize commercial viability. But seemingly not Larsson, who dressed a model in nothing more than the shell of a wooden cello for the final look in her show. Does she not feel the pressure to sell wearable styles to hit margins? “You can’t do what everyone else is doing,” said Larsson, explaining that it was more important to act with “a good purpose.”
“If you stick to that purpose, it’s not a problem,” she said. “You find solutions.”