SIRLOIN JAPAN AND SWEDEN

What’s your dream for the future? Mao Usami and Alve Lagercrantz: “We want to dress the world in stupidly elegant garments, because stupid elegance is our brand ethos. It describes individuals who can embrace themselves and their imperfections with pride and con dence.” Tell us about

yourselves. Alve: “I come from Sweden and I graduated from Central Saint Martins with Mao.” Mao: “I moved from Japan to London to study. Then we founded our label in Shanghai.” Did you collaborate with anyone before establishing your brand? Alve: “I worked at Dries Van Noten.” Mao: “I worked at Louis Vuitton.” When did you launch your rst collection? “For FW 2017 18 in Paris, at the Madeleine’s toilets.” Tell us about the mood board of your SS 2018. “As the collection was inspired by China’s nouveau riche, we had lots of weird and funny consumer items that we found on the Chinese e-commerce site Taobao. It’s an amazing melting pot of innovative, distorted objects, like the Facekini (a bikini for the face) and the most innovative copies imaginable of LV bags with Gucci logos, and so on. There were also pictures from our trip to casinos in Macau, stills from ‘Miami Vice’ and pictures of iconic faces such as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum. We then re ected the results of this collage in our Paris presentation, where our models all became identical with Sirloin’s self-made super-model face mask.” •