Fashion guru Sophia Kokosalaki dies at 47

LONDON>> Sophia Kokosalaki, a widely admired London-based clothing designer who drew on her Greek heritage in highlighting classical silhouettes and artful drapery, died Sunday in London. She was 47.

Her death was confirmed by Antony Baker, her partner and the managing director of her brand, Sophia Kokosalaki. No cause was given.

Over more than two decades Kokosalaki became one of the most prominent Greek designers of her generation, respected by such star peers as Alexander McQueen and Kim Jones for her balancing a cutting-edge feminine look with ancient Greek, Minoan and Byzantine motifs.

She was a forerunner of a new wave of European fashion designers who moved to London to study, then stayed to set up their businesses.

“After Sophia came a stream of Europeans as integral to London’s fashion cultural renaissance in the 2000s,” Sarah Mower, Vogue.com’s chief fashion critic, said in an email, “including Roksanda Ilincic, Marios Schwab, Peter Pilotto, Mary Katrantzou and Marques Almeida.”

In a signal honor, Kokosalaki was chosen to be chief clothing designer for the summer Olympic Games in Athens in 2004. Katrantzou, a fellow Greek designer who also works in London, said in a statement that she was “eternally grateful to Sophia for making us all feel proud to be Greek and communicating the values of our culture far beyond our borders.”

Kokosalaki was born in Athens on Nov. 3, 1972, to Vasilios and Stella (Leonidaki) Kokosalakis. Her mother was a journalist and her father was a civil engineer. Initially wanting to be a writer, Kokosalaki studied literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, but all the while, she later said, she had been resisting an internal call to pursue a career in fashion. When she was 3, she had started drawing dresses with price tags, she said, and at 11 she had taken notice of how people dressed.

“Back then in Greece — we’re talking the mid-1990s — it wasn’t considered serious to do fashion,” she told the London newspaper The Evening Standard in 2010. “In England, you have art colleges and you take it seriously. But the examples I had growing up were few, and they weren’t necessarily inspiring. Being a designer was a last resort. It was not the thing you did if you were a model academic.”

Kokosalaki decided to move to London, where she earned a master’s degree at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design. Among her professors was Louise Wilson, then the kingmaker of British fashion. She graduated in 1998 and debuted her first womenswear collection at London Fashion Week a year later. Her blend of draping and plissé with rock star energy gave birth to an aesthetic that would be her signature.

“Sophia was the first designer to emerge from Central Saint Martins who fused a European heritage — classical drapery, Hellenic folk craft — with a minimalist sense of how that could be worn on the street or in a club,” Mower said in a tribute to Kokosalaki that was published in Vogue. Mower recalled watching McQueen — then one of the most revered designers in the world — shouldering his way through crowds outside Kokosalaki’s show in 2002 to see her new work.

After a stint as a guest designer at the Italian leather company Ruffo Research, and after winning the new Generation Designer prize at the Fashion Awards in Britain in 2003, she was given an even more distinguished accolade: the appointment as chief designer of the 2004 Olympics.