For its AW24 collection presented today in London, Norwegian designer Maria Skappel took her design team “into the woods” to forage for fungal inspiration
While many brands scour image archives, museums or libraries for inspiration, for Holzweiler’s autumn/winter '24 collection, designer Maria Skappel and her team went into the forest and foraged. Specifically, they were looking for mycelium and their corresponding ‘fruit’, better known as mushrooms. “There’s a whole world out there of textures and colours and things popping up from the ground,” says Skappel, noting that in her native Norway foraging is having a bit of a moment. “Ever since I was a child we have gone mushroom hunting, so I brought the whole design team into the woods.”
Mushrooms manifest throughout the collection in all sorts of ways. There are the fuzzy knit textures that mirror the über trendy lion’s mane mushroom, the delicate pleating reminiscent of the underbelly of the oyster or the chanterelle and even tiny, glimmering crystals – adorning a signature Holzweiler puffer, for instance – to mirror the water droplets that gather on fungi at first light.
And then there are the fungal silhouettes, realised by way of clever styling (once again, the brand has tapped stylist Francesca Burns). Ruched, sheer tube dresses are worn over ankle skimming gowns to create a long, lean stem that blooms to a delicate spore-like bottom. That aforementioned puffer is simply worn upside down to create a shroom-like shape around the shoulders. “Instead of creating something totally new, we decided to just play on the volumes of these jackets,” notes Skappel. Nestled among Holzweiler’s signature soft pastel hues are psychedelic prints; a cheeky nod to a different sort of mushroom’s properties.
For the brand’s second LFW outing, guests (including three generations of Holzweilers sitting front row) were not challenged to brave the elements. Instead, Holzweiler’s fungi-like fashion floated through the halls of the Tate Britain. When Skappel first visited the space, she saw a piece by artist Anya Gallaccio – four panels of decaying flowers suspended in glass. “It just felt so right,” she says. Like finding a perfect mushroom, nestled in a forest.
See the full Holzweiler AW24 collection below:
