The coincidence of Moschino’s fortieth anniversary and Avavav’s first appearance on Milan’s official calendar seems like one of those examples of meaningful, if coincidental, synchronicity. In three short years, Beate Karlsson has built a reputation as a disruptor; With the spring collection No Time to Design, No Time to Explore, she followed in the footsteps of Franco Moschino by also taking on the role of fashion conscience. Just like the Italian, she manages to keep her sense of humor.
The anthropomorphic shoes of Karlsson, a young Swede, trained in London and New York and operating between Stockholm and Florence, are gold on Instagram, just like her previous two outings. In one, models stumbled down the catwalk – a play on the falling model meme. The following season was a parade of walking fashion disasters, with models’ clothes falling off and straps and heels breaking as they navigated the catwalk. When asked if she felt pressure to make noise, Karlsson said: “Obviously it’s been super important for us over the last two years because we were completely new. We had to say, ‘Hey, here’s a brand! This is us!’ But I’m starting to get a bit tired of it, because I think there’s a general trend in the industry right now to be loud, which can be very painful and almost feel desperate if there’s no depth to it. It was super important for us to know that we really wanted to say something.”
Karlsson was hired as the brand’s creative director in 2020, bought out the original owners with a partner last year and has since had seemingly endless meetings about contracts and negotiations with lawyers. Not only did this give the designer a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes reality of the company, but it also left her little time to actually put her training into practice and create clothes. Karlsson isn’t the only creative person who thinks this way; this is a situation that many people find themselves in. Beyond specific business cases, the number of audiences a designer must constantly engage with – and satisfy – is simply unsustainable. This Avavav outing, the designer wrote, was “about the frustration, anger and fear that this stress causes and the irony of it.”
