Ann-Sofie Back: “When I look at the young designers today I’m often like, 'I did that in 1998'”

When Ann-Sofie Back was approached by a friend about collaborating on an interiors collection, her first response was, “No, go away.” At another friend’s apartment, in Södermalm, Back makes herself a cheese and ham sandwich before settling into an armchair with her coffee, her phone, and her snus. They are the quintessential props for Stockholm fashion industry’s long-reigning queen of cool. “My day is spent searching for these two things,” she says, gesturing to the phone and snus. At her feet, her chihuahua, who is un-ironically called Lille (the Swedish word for little), plays. Appropriately enough, the scene is all very homely.

This notion of Back feeling at home is apt; her new label Gnilmyd Kcab, which she ultimately founded with Mattias Dymling (it’s the duo’s surnames spelt backwards) is the designer’s homecoming, literally. After closing her beloved eponymous fashion label in 2018, she has returned, taking on interiors with signature gusto. One look at the quirky, statement-making collection and you can’t help but think Ann-Sofie Back is, well, back. And she knows it, too. “It's been really fantastic to be naive about something again,” she says. “It’s given me a drive for design. I’ve woken up.”

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Though many of Gnilmyd Kcab’s items serve an identifiable purpose – lamp, rug, chair cover – the duo prefers to call them ‘design objects’, a phrase typically reserved for chachkas and other decorative items. Each piece is a gut-punch, not meant to necessarily blend into a singular, coordinated aesthetic. “The underlying aspect is the idea of making objects that are not made to fit in one particular style,” Dymling explains. “It's more about solitaires and making objects that stand out.” The result is ‘accessories’ that could live just as comfortably – or uncomfortably – in a castle, hotel or Södermalm apartment.

The opening lineup of Gnilmyd Kcab’s anticipated launch includes three product categories: Scalp (wigs fashioned as lampshades), Trophy (coats reimagined as chair covers and rugs) and Gala (pillows and lampshades with dramatic trains). “All the pieces are ‘soft’,” says Dymling. “It’s like the wardrobe has spilled over into the home.”

When it comes to favourites, Dymling can’t pick but Back instantly points out the wig lampshade in red. “The hair of a woman is very important,” she explains. “I've always been interested in wigs, I would have loved to have wigs in a runway show, but I never could afford it. So now I’m like ‘Wigs, finally’.” She describes the Gala pieces as “very red carpet, very paparazzi” and when it comes to the coat, “It’s a little bit sexual. A little bit of a ‘What happened last night?’ vibe.” I ask if you can wear it as a coat, Dymling explains it is in fact designed like any other coat, however, that’s definitely not the intention.

“We are happy for customers to use it as they like, we just don’t want to see that,” laughs Back. After her initial trepidation towards the concept of interiors, Back soon had 50 products ready in her mind. “I've always been super interested in interiors, but I’m not very knowledgeable,” she says. “I don’t know who the important designers are or that kind of thing, but I know my taste.”

This freedom to create and explore has meant that Back fans are seeing a new side of the designer. A side that is even surprising herself. In the past, Back’s fashion aesthetic is one she has referred to as ‘failed glamour’. As Paola Bjäringer, founder of Stockholm’s art gallery Misschiefs puts it, “Long before Balenciaga, she was working on making the ugly and non-trendy super hot, twisting the mundane into high fashion.”

A lot of Back’s original work involved upcycling and second-hand materials (unheard of in the 1990s), giving her pieces a slightly undone finish. “With Ann-Sofie Back, Swedish fashion took a necessary step away from looking upon fashion as a tool for creating beauty,” explains Karina Ericsson Wärn, vice chancellor of Beckmans College of Design. “[She] underlined our failing, she worked with breaking down and then reconstructing.”

However, these interior accessories definitely aren’t failed glamour. They evoke opulence and grandeur with aplomb. I ask about this. “You’re right,” she muses. “Maybe I dare to do that when my design leaves the body.” “If it’s on the body, then I want to mess it up more,” she continues. “I think I’m a little bit more objective when things leave the body. I maybe can be a bit more free. I’m more stuck in my ideas about fashion, how it should be and what it should say and things like that.”

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But for those who have followed her illustrious career, the interior objects offer a sense of déjà vu. “These designs are inspired by what I was inspired by,” Back says. “So it’s not like I see these pieces as, say, questioning femininity, which I did a lot in my fashion designs. It’s more that they kind of fit in with my collections and my previous thoughts.”

One clear example is the Gala pillow and lampshade which can be tied to Back’s 2000s celebrity obsession collection, a social stance against the shockingly invasive paparazzi pictures coming out at the time. “It was about how the British media really hounded Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan,” she explains of the range that included split seams, shirts over crumpled dresses and lots of thongs. “I’m inspired by things that I find are a problem.”

“She is more of an artist,” says Swedish stylist and model Ursula Wångander, who also happens to have a few of these ‘objects’ around her home. “She investigates things, she is curious, and tries to under stand things. Her eyes see things that others don’t. Who’d think of having a lamp in our home that was before only a wig?”

Back got into fashion because her “parents wore really bad clothes”. She remembers asking her mum what she had to do to become a fashion designer. Her mum, a psychologist, didn’t know, so she called up the trend area at department store NK. “They told her, oh, you need to be able to sew and you need to know marketing and then drawing and you should learn how to make patterns,” Back recalls. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m not going to be a designer, I’m going to be a lawyer instead. That seems easier.’”

Thankfully for Scandinavian fashion, she stuck it out. She graduated from Beckmans School of Design in Stockholm before going to study at the famed Central Saint Martins in London. There, she forged a career that saw her helm three of her own labels – Ann-Sofie Back, Ateljé and Back – with shows at London Fashion Week. She also worked as a designer and creative director for Scandi icons such as Acne Studios and Cheap Monday.

“Back became known internationally as a designer when no one from Scandinavia, apart from Ikea and H&M, were known,” says her former agent Adam Iezzi of London-based PR company A.I. “This is important because it led the way for others who were offering a more elevated design from this part of the world to be accepted. She has a vision that makes astute observations on popular culture while remaining self-deprecating and humorous. Her ready-to-wear was wonderful in that way.”

The word ‘trailblazer’ is often thrown around when it comes to Back, and eagle-eyed fashion connoisseurs will see a lot of her influence in up-and-coming designers today. There is also an extreme appetite from the industry to document her influence. Case in point: she is currently working on a book about her design for an art and theory publishing house, set for release in 2024, and, in connection to this, she’s doing a large retrospective exhibition at Stockholm art museum Liljevalchs.

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“I put Rei Kawakubo in the same league as Ann-Sofie, and the early Martin Margiela. The latter actually came to copy Ann-Sofie...” adds Ericsson Wärn. Yet while people have nothing but glowing words for her, Back has previously said that she is “the most underappreciated designer in the world”. I ask if she really believes that. She laughs and says, “At the moment I do.” “While working on the book, I’ve been reading through all the old reviews of my collections from when I showed them in London,” she says. “They actually wrote some really horrible things about me.”

She explains that, at the time, it was water off a duck’s back and what she really means by the ‘underappreciated’ comment is that sometimes she’s been too far ahead. The curse of trailblazing means you sometimes don’t receive the commercial gains. “It’s not always the best thing to be first,” she says. “It’s about timing.” With the world eagerly looking to Scandinavia for agenda-setting interiors, it feels a little like history repeating itself, with Gnilmyd Kcab set to trailblaze in a whole new space.

Bjäringer explains that Back had an ability to show the world Swedish fashion is not a one-track look. And with Scandinavian minimalism being a global interior phenomenon – or stereotype, depending how you look at it – a red wig lampshade and OTT pillow certainly seem poised to shake things up. “Back has inspired a whole generation of fashion students to go their own way resulting in a wave of more experimental brands,” says Bjäringer. Or as Back playfully puts it: “When I look at the young designers today I’m often like ‘I did that in 1998’.”