When she was 14 and a competitive equestrian, the Swedish designer Ellen Hodakova Larsson, who has made a name for herself by spinning old stuff into fashion gold, attended a training camp. There, she was paired with a horse larger and more volatile than any she’d encountered before. The stallion, she recalled, seemed able to jump twice his considerable height into the air. Rather than unnerving—or, let’s be honest, terrifying—her, the experience taught the young rider to trust herself. “I told myself, ‘Never be afraid of this,’ ” says Larsson, now 32. “If you keep calm and are stable in yourself, you will find that the world is not as horrific as it can seem to be.” In her chosen career, the lesson has proven invaluable.
In September, Larsson, who designs under her grandmother’s maiden name, Hodakova, was awarded the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, which comes with a €400,000 stipend and a year of mentoring from the luxury conglomerate’s executives. The prize is a prestigious recognition of talent, and winning it can be an indicator of future success: Since inaugurating the prize in 2013, LVMH has recognized designers such as Marine Serre, Grace Wales Bonner, and Simon Porte Jacquemus. But Hodakova’s win marks the first time the award has gone to a brand whose business model so directly challenges the foundation of relentless consumption that the fashion industry is built on. (The winner of the runner-up Karl Lagerfeld Prize, Duran Lantink, also focuses on sustainability.)
It was an acknowledgment of one of fashion’s uncomfortable truths: Young designers can’t focus solely on creativity—they also have to wrestle with the daunting task of fixing a broken system. Larsson’s solution is rooted in the make-do-and-mend skills she learned while growing up on a farm: She uses deadstock, vintage pieces, and repurposed materials, which range from discarded shirts to old cutlery. It’s an approach she has described as a never-ending challenge, but it’s the only way she feels comfortable working.
Larsson, her brother, and her parents—her mother is a fur seamstress; her father an army officer—moved to her grandparents’ farm when she was a small girl, after her grandmother was widowed. Larsson describes her childhood as idyllic but hardly privileged—some of the horses she competed on were not her own but ones her family was paid to care for. The family bartered with their neighbors and shopped in secondhand stores, where Larsson’s mother taught her to “search for surprises and possibilities: A lamp could change pattern, a chair receive new fabric, a dress become a skirt. My mom changed the whole house.” Later, when she was in fashion school, Larsson found herself bored by new fabric. “My creative process is always based on dissecting things and putting them together and making a puzzle,” she says. “When something appears that you feel is interesting, and you can connect to all of these thoughts and combinations, that’s the magic of creation.”
It’s this enthusiasm for the Duchampian possibilities of the found object, combined with the fearlessness Larsson learned as an equestrian, that animates Hodakova. Larsson admires both Martin Margiela and Elsa Schiaparelli, the former for his deconstructive methods and the latter for her inspired whimsy. To date, she has turned serving trays into bustiers, sculpted work boots into corsets, and made paintings into dresses. Underlying these Surrealist experiments (Schiaparelli) is a deep respect for the rigor of uniforms (Margiela), something that she links to her father’s military spruceness and that appears in her own wardrobe. Her team, she says, teases her about her dedication to a look: “They’re always telling me, ‘Oh, you changed clothes now, after three weeks of wearing the exact same thing!’ ”
Larsson’s childhood plays an important part in all her work, but it’s especially prominent in her latest collection, which she describes as “a diary entry from the memories that I have from growing up.” Her formative experiences on horseback? They’ve been channeled into double-stacked riding boots. Her mother’s furrier skills? A frock fashioned from fur caps. Her father’s sartorial elegance? Men’s trousers turned into a dress. Recollections of happy family meals? A tea towel blouse and skirt.
There is more going on than just visual punning, of course. When Larsson creates dresses from trousers or stacked-up men’s shirt collars, she’s prodding us to think about gender roles. When she turns garments upside down or inside out to reimagine them, she’s upending conceptions of desire and luxury. And she is always reminding us that doing the right thing doesn’t need to be boring; it can be freeing and playful and even sexy. She sent down the runway a dress made of zippers that hugged the torso with metal teeth and swished around the knees in spiky ribbons.
But Larsson remains uneasy with the fashion world. Asked when she knew fashion was important to her, she answers that she’s not sure it is. Style, she suggests, is more durable. Her view of the industry is similarly focused on the long term. She and her team have been working with an AI model to streamline the sorting process of secondhand materials, and it’s toward this end that she plans on focusing her LVMH mentorship and funding. All the old coats and outgrown children’s clothes that are donated to charities every year end up compacted haphazardly into giant bales, the contents of which are anyone’s guess. This makes planning a collection that relies on these materials frustrating, to say the least. Larsson wants to eliminate the wastefulness of this ad hoc mess by creating a library of categories that secondhand dealers can use to organize their goods and designers can search and order from. It’s a herculean undertaking, but to design any other way, Larsson maintains, is irresponsible. “Everyone knows that we can’t keep on this way because our Earth will explode. We need a change of behavior and a change of mindset.”
Grooming by Josefin Gligic for Oribe at Linkdetails; Models: Matilda Liedholm at Lis Rutten Agency, Erika Wall at Nisch Management; Casting by Samuel Ellis Scheinman; Casting Assistant: Maddalena Serra; Produced by LOLA Production; Fashion Assistant: Rachael Fair.