Touchy Feely with Chopova Lowena

To honor the meticulously detailed, handmade construction of Chopova Lowena’s one-of-a-kind designs, we asked NYC-based paper artist Nell Jocelyn Slaughter to reimagine offerings from the label’s SS21 collection.

Chopova Lowena’s two halves comprise Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena, who formed the label while completing their joint MA at London’s Central Saint Martins in 2017, from which they launched five (soon to be six) collections. They’ve since staged a campaign starring Britain’s equestrian vaulting team, won the first ever jointly-awarded LVMH Prize, and been worn this year by the likes of (shirtless) Harry Styles in Vogue and Michaela Coel in The Wall Street Journal. Chopova, who was born in Bulgaria but moved to the U.S. when she was seven, met the English Lowena (her family bred Cavalier King Charles Spaniels), at CSM on the first day of their BA, where a mutual love of skirts drew them together, as skirts will on the first day of fashion school. Skirts have since become a staple and something of a phenomenon within their collaboration, a plaiting of their vintage Eastern European-meets-sportswear aesthetic that sits at the very center of the body. To misquote The Dude, they really tie the looks together.

Skirt is an understatement. A Chopova Lowena skirt is the categorical superlative; it is the most skirt I have ever seen. Short or long, or flared to near-crinoline proportions, or wrapped and buckled, or folded as richly as the top of a Viennetta cake—the silhouettes are far from subtle. I imagine that if cascaded across the floor, one might resemble Netherlandish tulip fields shot from above. The skirt is buckled into submission by handfuls of metal carabiners, harnessed to a leather belt that fastens around the wearer’s waist. In tartans and wool, it is a kaleidoscopic kilt. But it also evokes a fustanella, the Balkan variant that predates the Scottish kilt—a pleated wrap garment worn by men and women alike, paired with aprons, and elaborately folded for warmth. As Chopova told Vogue last year, “[Our skirts] are based on an old-school Eastern European phrase about warming ovaries.”

Constructed by European artisans, seamstresses, and the designers themselves, Chopova Lowena’s process is meticulously detailed. Much of the 144-piece SS21 collection was sewn in their respective London apartments, supervised by a Boston terrier named Ida, in Lowena’s case. “This one dress, I think we sewed it and took it apart four or five times,” says Lowena. “If it doesn’t look right, it can’t continue.” For Chopova, this is the finest expression of high fashion. It is in the careful combinations of patchwork and textiles, and their balance of materials, from vintage English tea towels to thousands of Bulgarian beads. “When I think about certain techniques we use—like the loom beading, done by a lady whose granny taught her how to bead. She makes every single necklace with a tiny little needle by hand. I think that’s pretty luxurious,” says Chopova.

Naturally, one person’s luxury is another’s labor. From the beginning, Chopova Lowena rooted their design process in the expanding field of sustainable fashion, which in their case means sourcing deadstock and vintage materials, as well as recycling fabrics down to their fiber—remilling them in a way that is old news to say, Patagonia, but still relatively novel to the mainstream, let alone luxury, fashion industry. Waste reduction and environmental sustainability extend through the whole of their process, from conception to manufacturing. Chopova’s parents, who returned to Bulgaria after retiring in 2017, help them source and clean the vintage materials they handpick, spearheaded by Chopova’s fastidious mother, Iolanta. “She inspects them. She mends them. She embroiders them. She bleaches them,” Chopova says. “She’s obsessed with them being perfect.”

Lowena, who trained dogs competitively during her teenage years, brings an athletic slant to the design that is neither ironic nor precisely earnest. “I try to sneak a dog into every season,” she says. From rock climbing to roller derby, Lowena’s approach belies a love of contact sports and their nylon (s)trappings. One of the original images that the duo drew inspiration from is an 80s photograph of French rock climber and mountaineer Catherine Destivelle. In it, Destivelle is spandex-clad in a shiny pink bathing suit with a red harness and carabiners cinched around her hips. Through the lens of their clothes, the bungies and harnesses feel muscular and sexy, even suggestive.

Chopova Lowena sets a precedent that simultaneously moves backward through time, to Bulgarian village craftspeople and deadstock fabrics and folkloric traditions that don’t exist anywhere but in people’s hands. The designers use antique forms—a broad pilgrim collar, a smocked bodice—like quotations, which are then eased into their avant-garde textures and colours. Each Chopova Lowena garment represents an archive of ideas and execution; a composite of past, present, and future. None of their designs are to be put on and forgotten, nor how they were made.

I know I am not alone in my retreat to softness this year. But looking at pictures of Destivelle, flush against a 90-degree rock face, her eyes boring up at her goal, I feel a pull toward clothing (and activities) that are not so anodyne. We are, in more ways than we realize, what we wear, and Chopova Lowena’s vision is an ideal that I am ever more drawn to. And although I’m not free soloing a mountain, or, even more doubtful, attending a party, perhaps putting on a short, pleated skirt ringed with 30 or so carabiners might make me feel, in some necessary way, that I could do both.

Naomi Skwarna is based in Toronto, Canada.