Rising talent, names to know: ‘Uprising’ is a monthly feature highlighting an energetic new vanguard of fashion talent, selected by the Wallpaper* style team.
Crib notes
Name: Ellen Hodakova Larsson
Brand: Hodakova
Alumnus of: The Swedish School of Textiles
Signature style: Equestrian rigour meets experimental glamour.
Design philosophy
Ellen Hodakova Larsson is both a dreamer and a pragmatist. Raised on a farm in rural Sweden, the designer grew up feeding the horses every morning, chopping wood when her dad was on military service, and watching her crafty mum hand-make everything from clothes to furniture. It’s a life of pastoral simplicity that one might think would be at odds with a career in fashion. However, Larsson’s youth has shaped a design language that is completely her own. Led by an innate respect for the land, the designer makes treasure out of countryside deadstock, twisting the preppy codes of equestrian-wear with a wildly experimental kind of glamour. ‘Looking after the farm and the animals, it’s a kind of care that has shaped me in so many ways,’ she tells Wallpaper* over a video call from her home in Stockholm, where she now lives. ‘You appreciate everything you get back.’
We’re meeting on an afternoon in mid-December, and the designer says she spent the night before enjoying Christmas festivities with her team. ‘I still have a little bit of a headache,’ she says. ‘But it’s a really good time to celebrate with everyone here in Sweden.’ Celebrations are more than well-deserved. Larsson has worked incredibly hard in 2024, producing two mind-bendingly meticulous collections, crafting bespoke pieces for celebrities like Cate Blanchett and Saoirse Ronan, and making history as the first Swedish designer to win the LVMH Prize. ‘It’s been a crazy year,’ she says. ‘People have been supportive in so many ways. It’s been amazing seeing how they’ve connected with the work.’
(Image credit: Courtesy of Hodakova)
Larsson founded her namesake brand in 2021 upon graduating from Stockholm Textile School. In these brief years, she has already honed a design language that is rich and deep, breathing new life into materials sourced from the countryside with incredible wit and skill. Shown in a shadowy chamber on Place Vendôme, her runway debut at Paris Fashion Week this September saw items forgotten by time – such as leather belts, buttons, pocket watches, and oil paintings – woven and warped into a collection that celebrated the landscapes of her childhood. Fur berets salvaged from second-hand stores clumped to make cocktail dresses; riding boots were deconstructed and remodelled into mini skirts; and vintage tea towels were refashioned into chic A-line sets. An astonishing display of emotion and craft, it signalled Larsson’s arrival as one of fashion’s most interesting new storytellers.
‘It’s always like a little bit of a diary entry from my point of view, of where I am in relation to the world,’ she says when asked what was on her mind during its making. ‘It was about my love for being in the quiet countryside, the spatiality. I spend more time in the city than I’ve ever done before, and I feel like I have a hate-love relationship with it. I’ve just been in a period of longing back to some kind of root or airiness. I romanticise about the smell of the stables nowadays when I’m here.’
Beyond the fantastical efforts of her more conceptual pieces – such as a dress crafted from landscape oil paintings, worn as if the model were piercing through the horizon – the goosebump-raising effect of Larsson’s work is in the details. Leather belts interlock in intricate lattices, waves of glimmering zippers echo the brushstrokes of paintings, and dozens of starched collars encase the body in ribbon-like pleats. Larsson’s process is tactile, and she often starts by draping directly onto the body before spending hours playing with materials that we often overlook, like buttons or zips, in the hope that bringing them into focus will make us think about clothes in a new way. ‘I like using materials that everyone knows, that people recognise,’ she says. ‘I try to use them in a way that changes your perspective. It creates more consciousness.’
(Image credit: Courtesy of Hodakova)
Paired with these ideas is another kind of consciousness. Larsson’s dream is to build a fully sustainable fashion house, and she has set about laying down slow, resourceful practices to make that a reality. ‘We have a quite big sorting facility here and there are a lot of second-hand companies we have a collaboration with,’ she says. ‘I really care about the earth. I don’t understand how we can live in the world and make so much garbage. We need to do it in another way.’
From telling stories grown from the soil of Strängnäs to the effort of transforming hundreds of spoons into a dress fit for the red carpet, for Larsson everything is personal. At the close of a momentous year, looking forward to 2025, she’s not losing sight of what matters. ‘It’s super important for me to show the pieces that actually make me feel something,’ she says. ‘Because if I don’t feel it, no one else will.’
In their words
‘My mum and dad took over my grandma’s house when my grandpa died. There was a lot to do. It was a place where we had horses and animals. In general, we did everything a little bit ourselves, agricultural-wise. Both of my parents are very much doers. They’re super unafraid of jumping into projects and not knowing anything; they’ve always trusted the way of learning by doing. My mum’s a really good painter. She’s a really good seamstress. She’s really good at interior design. She’s good at everything. I appreciate it so much because she always did this around us. We were part of it.
‘I always loved painting and my mum encouraged me to study art. We were quite free at the fashion school; they just gave us the tools to understand where we were going. We learned to do tailoring. We learned to do big object spatiality projects. We did everything in between art and construction. I think that’s where I am, you know? I think all these things combined and developed, and design became a very natural way for me to think about the communication of ideas. I want to create work that makes you wonder or creates curiosity. I think curiosity is what makes us have conversations.
‘With my upbringing, sustainability is just a core thing of mine. I think it’s amazing to see that people want to be part of this kind of change. It’s not about trends. It’s actually rooted in the realness of the garments. There’s so much work put into them, but when they come together it’s just a little bit of a magic moment. I want everyone to feel that I mean it. It’s the difference between an oil painting and an acrylic one.’
Where to buy
Shop Hodakova at Ssense and hodakova.com.
