Eftychia Karamolegkou’s spring collection is all about the weirdness and ambiguity of living—and designing—in a pandemic. And then: the curious question of what feels right to wear when going out into a changed world.
In before-times, Karamolegkou focussed her presentations on tailoring for working women’s lives—her last had an airport departure gate packed with female business travelers. Well, that scenario’s pretty much a thing of the past—and what with emerging, and perhaps permanent, hybrid patterns of remote working, the notion of any fixed city-appropriate dress code is being disbanded as fast as city office space is going out of fashion.
So here was a subject for Karamolegkou to tackle head-on. “The pandemic was horrible, yes, but in a way it freed me to get out of my boxes, and stop thinking about business wear,” she said at a preview in her studio. “I’m always designing from what I’m wearing myself, and observing how others are dressing. I started to notice that on days when women were starting to come back into the office they were wearing whatever they felt like.” A line in her press release nailed that psychological shift: “The recent period has blasted away inconsequential matters, and qualms and restrictions about how we dress.”
So this collection is “more playful, more flexible, a fresh start.” Karamolegkou’s subtle transition was partly based on translating and upgrading her own habitual working at-home uniform of band T-shirts and pareos. Still using her menswear tailoring fabrics from British mills, she cut skirts and dresses with a deep u-shaped slash to reveal one leg, and turned some of her signature “grandpa” trousers into Bermuda shorts. The band T-shirt idea became long-sleeved cotton tees fronted with embroideries.
Her reconfiguration of the pant suit operated on more casual, relaxed lines, with decorative fraying in the seams—a detail also echoed in fringed leather trousers. It’s the same woman she’s aiming to dress—but with different priorities and longings as she looks forward to next summer. Hopefully, with some strictly non-business travel included. “During the lockdowns, I was dreaming of Ibiza,” she admitted. Well, we can all relate to that.
