All the rave
It was a shared passion for vintage and upcycling that united Josephine Bergqvist and Livia Schück, the eco-conscious founders of Swedish label Rave Review. By Clare Press.
says Josephine Bergqvist, when asked about Rave Review’s use of materials that are already in existence. “We want to make a statement about fashion waste. I think many new designers care about this, but it’s also fun.”
“It’s also about the aesthetics,” says her design partner Livia Schück. “We like the look of old things and mixing vintage prints and weaves. We like colours, and clashing. Upcycling defines us to some extent, because it’s what we do, but at the same time, we want you to see it as a cool piece.”
The duo’s Stockholm-based label is causing a stir for its visual exuberance as much as its sustainability credentials. Best known for its coats pieced together from colourful vintage checked wool blankets and sold through Matchesfashion, Browns and its own website, Rave Review’s numbered womenswear collections are expanding.
At Copenhagen fashion week in January, the designers showed patchworked shirts, draped evening dresses and tailored trousers cut from a mix of deadstock cottons, and their beloved blankets, 1970s tapestries and printed vintage bed linen. One quilted coat used to be a sleeping bag. “We left the label on. See?” says Bergqvist. “We like the character of old things, and the stories.”
Even their brand name is upcycled – the pair came across ‘rave review’ on a vintage dress label, checked it was defunct and repurposed it.
Having met as fashion students at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, they were both wary of joining the conventional fashion industry, although
Schück interned at Acne Studios after graduation. Bergqvist had her heart on further study at St Martins, but didn’t get in.
“I was just off the plane from London and feeling a bit sad,” she recalls. “We went for a beer and talked about the sort of fashion we wanted to make, and the sort we didn’t.”
What issues concerned them? Carelessly adding to the 100 billion-plus garments produced each year, for starters. “You work so hard in design school, but then you start to question: is fashion actually contributing anything good?” says Bergqvist. “The whole industry has problems. It’s the volume.
I don’t want to be designing something that will be made in
“YES, IT’S POLITICAL,”
the hundreds of thousands of units, for the cheapest possible price.”
“Also, everything looks the same,” says Schück. “What’s the point? You need to do something unique.”
And so it came that they turned their shared obsession with second-hand textiles into Rave Review. They source from charity shops, vintage resellers and private sellers online. Anything that appeals to their magpie aesthetic is fair game – a neckpiece made from broken crockery sits on the table, and they’ve lately been weaving clutches out of plastic bags and used bubble wrap. But it’s the blanket pieces, with their winsome meld of the cosy and the sharp, which everyone is mad for. Not that everyone can have one.
“We have to set a limit when we meet buyers, so we will say: ‘You can have 20.’” They make life hard for themselves. It’s not unusual to have to cut garment by garment, singly. Their small-scale Swedish manufacturers enjoy it, they say, “because it’s more creative”. But how are they making money? The sourcing process is no less painstaking.
“It’s not the most efficient thing to do, production-wise, maybe, because no two garments are exactly the same,” says Bergqvist, adding that they’ve had to nudge buyers to think in a new way. “But the point is that it’s super-exclusive; it’s for people who feel the uniqueness is something strong. We don’t earn a lot of money and we put so much time into this, so of course we want to grow a little bit.”
“We do want to be able to do more, but also to have limits,” says Schück. “We won’t make pieces in the thousands. We want them to be special.”