Petra Fagerström Named London's 'Hottest Young Designer'
Designer Petra Fagerström has been recognized as London's “hottest young designer” following London Fashion Week. The accolade from British Vogue highlights her rising influence and ability to leverage both traditional craft and social media to build a narrative around her brand.
- Swedish-born Petra Fagerström is a graduate of Parsons Paris and is currently pursuing her MA in Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins. Her industry experience includes working at both Balenciaga in Paris and Acne Studios. - Her signature design technique is "lenticular pleating," which creates animated, shifting optical effects on garments as the wearer moves. This innovative approach to textiles is a core element of her brand, which she founded in 2022. - Fagerström's work is heavily focused on sustainability, utilizing upcycled and deadstock materials. This commitment has earned her several awards, including the Mercedes-Benz Sustainability Prize and the Chanel Atelier des Matières Prize at the 38th Festival d'Hyères in 2023. - For the prestigious Hyères festival, she created a dress from an upcycled parachute, an homage to her grandmother who was a parachutist in the Soviet Union. She also transformed spare automotive parts from Mercedes-Benz into wearable art. - She explores the intersection of technology and fashion by using AI as a tool in her creative process. Fagerström collaborated with Swedish AI company Substorm to explore how the technology could support designers, for example, by generating pattern ideas from merged images of her prototypes and research. - The brand is part of an incubator program with the Swedish Fashion Council, which is supporting the development of a sustainable production system and business plan for her label. - Her collections are stocked at influential retailers such as Dover Street Market Paris, H. Lorenzo in Los Angeles, and 10 Corso Como. - Before pursuing fashion, Fagerström was a competitive figure skater, and she cites the process of choosing fabrics and making her skating dresses each season as the initial spark for her interest in design.
