Eftychia (Q2990)
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Eftychia is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Eftychia |
Eftychia is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
The morning after the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, it could have been grating to go back fashion shows in London again. Serendipitously, Eftychia Karamolegkou’s collection came as a salve for frayed nerves. Seeing her first look—a brown blazer, white shirt, jeans—felt like a calming exhale.Her aesthetic offers the kind of perfectionist, tailored, off-hand casualness which there just isn’t enough of in the world. So rare and unusual have ‘normal’ and ‘easy’ become in a time of extreme dressing and logos that they’re practically avant-garde now.As the show progressed, with her high-waisted pants, double and single-breasted jackets, linen-knit singlets and charmeuse dresses, it echoed a touch of the minimalist ’90s Nineties—the same woman-centric field of design which the Olsen sisters at The Row, and Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski at Hermès work in. Tiny as her business may be, Karamolegkou distinguishes herself as one of the sisterhood of designers who think about the long-haul usefulness of clothes.Karamolegkou concentrates on nuances of cut, using luxuriously refined tailoring fabric from the 150-year-old British weaving mill in Yorkshire, William Halstead. That partly accounts for her ability to tailor lightweight, unlined gray jackets with a neat flatness to the lapels. The other factor, perhaps, is down to her Greek roots; her innate understanding of how to circumvent the problems of appearing coolly put-together in a hot summer.Well, no need to say why that answers a pressing need in the face of climate heating. She factored in another considerately utilitarian set of separates in technical fabrics, like slit-side skirts, which were bolted with metal-riveted tabs at the sides, and lined with a looped-up layer of cotton voile next to the skin.Props to Karamolegkou for putting out her vision of individuality in London Fashion Week. There are many who may grab more immediate attention, but the potential attraction to an international market of women is real.
20 September 2022
In a London season bristling with performative phenomena embodying generational values—to admiringly mangle Anders Christian Madsen—this Eftychia collection felt ironically like a tantalizing outlier. For not since Paula Gerbase’s sadly-evaporated 1205 has London shown a startup female-designed womenswear brand rooted in a deep knowledge and appreciation of tailoring.Eftychia Karamolegkou has understandably been working through a professional existential crisis of sorts, given that her brand’s original focus was work/business attire and the bottom fell out of that market during the pandemic. She sprinkled in softer pieces during the last few seasons, and here again there were silk satin slip dresses and skirts aplenty in a dedicatedly brown-based palette with occasional gulps of pale yellow and cream, sometimes played against panels of velvet. These tended to be strafed by sutures executed with rouleau loops and mother of pearl buttons to create a what-lies-beneath dialogue of surface with space.In her notes Karamolegkou said the collection, named Unfathomable Lights, was inspired by the depths of the ocean: it would have been interesting to also see some colors drawn from the surface—something a little punchier—applied to these sophisticated softer pieces. As for the tailoring, backstage the designer indicated the resolution of her meaning-of-tailoring crisis was to consider this collection as “casual evening wear.”That tailoring, which riffed inventively on the hoary old menswear tuxedo, was clever. The shtick was to take traditional elements of evening wear—such as the satin faux-regimental side stripe and the satin lapel—and then put them through a mixer: the side stripes were moved to the front of the leg, creating a flatteringly elongated effect, while the flashy satin lapel was broken up and slimmed down in panels resting alongside wool. There was what looked like an adapted shortened Chesterfield that took that style’s velvet collar and extended the velvet to act as pocket flaps. The silhouette was flattering and mature: low suited jackets above pleated tapered pants. A curving vector that ran from armpit to hip via collar and skirt on double-breasted jackets was particularly elegant, and mirrored the curve of those buttoned sutures. There were also some handsome high-waisted Nehru collar jackets, vaguely regimental again. All of this was worn against vintage boots and menswear shoes that are part of Karamolegkou’s personal collection.
Sophisticated, thoughtful, and excellently executed, this was a refreshing recalibration of tailoring’s traditional—and tangled—role as the uniform of empowerment.
19 February 2022
Eftychia Karamolegkou’s spring collection is all about the weirdness and ambiguity of living—and designing—in a pandemic. And then: the curious question of what feels right to wear when going out into a changed world.In before-times, Karamolegkou focussed her presentations on tailoring for working women’s lives—her last had an airport departure gate packed with female business travelers. Well, that scenario’s pretty much a thing of the past—and what with emerging, and perhaps permanent, hybrid patterns of remote working, the notion of any fixed city-appropriate dress code is being disbanded as fast as city office space is going out of fashion.So here was a subject for Karamolegkou to tackle head-on. “The pandemic was horrible, yes, but in a way it freed me to get out of my boxes, and stop thinking about business wear,” she said at a preview in her studio. “I’m always designing from what I’m wearing myself, and observing how others are dressing. I started to notice that on days when women were starting to come back into the office they were wearing whatever they felt like.” A line in her press release nailed that psychological shift: “The recent period has blasted away inconsequential matters, and qualms and restrictions about how we dress.”So this collection is “more playful, more flexible, a fresh start.” Karamolegkou’s subtle transition was partly based on translating and upgrading her own habitual working at-home uniform of band T-shirts and pareos. Still using her menswear tailoring fabrics from British mills, she cut skirts and dresses with a deep u-shaped slash to reveal one leg, and turned some of her signature “grandpa” trousers into Bermuda shorts. The band T-shirt idea became long-sleeved cotton tees fronted with embroideries.Her reconfiguration of the pant suit operated on more casual, relaxed lines, with decorative fraying in the seams—a detail also echoed in fringed leather trousers. It’s the same woman she’s aiming to dress—but with different priorities and longings as she looks forward to next summer. Hopefully, with some strictly non-business travel included. “During the lockdowns, I was dreaming of Ibiza,” she admitted. Well, we can all relate to that.
19 September 2021
Fashion as self-help therapy: Well, we’ve heard that idea often enough, but Eftychia Karamolegkou isn’t exactly a seller of meditational soft-wear. Rather, she’s a designer of tailoring and well-considered separates who projects herself with a strengthening empathy into the minds of women who are dressing for business-facing environments—the international female army who’d formerly be commuting to offices, deciding what to wear for presentations, and packing for business trips.Seasons past—this is her fourth—the Greek-born Londoner has set up vividly relatable presentation scenarios with pant-suited women frozen mid-brainstorm around a boardroom table, or assembled in ritual time-killing mode at an airport departure gate, surrounded by thickets of their business-trip carry-on bags. (Oh, those were the days, we might hollowly laugh.)Quite appropriately, this season the Eftychia woman is seen on her own, smashing things up. As a conceptual enactment of where we all are, it’s again one of the designer’s socially accurate readings. “All my things are influenced by what’s going on, wanting to comment on it, or by how I’m feeling at the moment,” she says. Her summer collection was inspired by watching prime ministers in TV studios talking about the coronavirus. “Then I had a really extremely bad time, feeling low and depressed in the fall—and at the same time, I was trying to work, to be creative about this collection. So I thought the video should be about the pain, struggle, and anger we’re all going through,” she remembers. “I’d started searching for therapies on YouTube, like tapping and meditation to help me. And as soon as I realized I could use that as design material,” she laughs, “I started to feel better!”And anyway, the gloom Eftychia had been feeling was also lifted by the fact that, confinement notwithstanding, women have given her their vote of confidence, buying her pants, jackets, and knits. “What I call my grandpa pants, which are cut with a curve in the knee, and things like my knitted polo—these are popular.”What’s her garment assistance for the home-trapped, possibly home-schooling executive for fall? (Well, let’s hope we’ll be at least liberated by then for some public affairs where smart dressing will be a thing again.) Beyond the cathartic flash of Eftychia’s protagonist smashing up crockery in Polly Brown’s video are the look book answers. Her drapey shirts (also a signature) now come as wrap-overs, “to tuck in however you like.
So if you’ve put on weight you care less.” For meet-ups that may or may not still be on screen, she has “a new twinset—like ladies used to wear—but as a matching brown turtleneck and a knitted jacket.” Other points in the executive support wardrobe are double-duty trompe l’oeil coats which give the impression that jackets are sewn into them, and jackets, likewise, with interior vests. As for the anxiety-relieving practice of tapping, well, maybe that could be discreetly managed through the Eftychia systems of side-pockets in outerwear.Anyhow, finding strategies to adapt to change is what women do. Going forward, clothes like Eftychia’s, which are designed to perform more than one role, will increasingly make sense. That could be her reversible, collarless black shearling jacket or something like her new short tailored dress, which in tandem with her trusty grandpa pants, can be transformed, as she says, “into this new kind of suit, with a feminine top.”
19 February 2021
Eftychia.Eff-ti-chee-a. That’s how you pronounce the name that is increasingly being passed around by London’s new-wave sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits. Every woman who knows the problems involved in acquiring a modern, efficient, good-looking wardrobe for professional daily wear would have burst out laughing in recognition of the airport departure-gate scenario Eftychia Karamolegkou set up for her second London Fashion Week presentation. “It’s a business trip,” she said.It’s not that we’vebeenthere—it’s that we are there routinely. Eftychia’s women, en route maybe to a summit, a corporate conference, or a Fashion Week, were absorbed, detached, reading, listening to podcasts while sitting and standing around with their Rimowa carry-ons beside them. Muffled bing-bong announcements triggered their getting up, moving off, rolling on. “What I want to do is smart, comfortable, casual tailoring for these people,” said the designer.The point is that there’s a very particular, choosy female demographic, which is achingly ready for this kind of tailoring—with the proviso that it has to come from a peer who gets it. Eftychia’s design is classic enough, and innovative enough, to pass through the stringent practical and psychological tests that experienced females apply before buying clothes. A gray pantsuit with a very slightly A-line jacket and pants had two Prince of Wales checks, one right side, one the other, paneled together—ergo, unboring. Some coats could also be worn as dresses. Matching A-line front-slit skirts and shirts made for neat, trompe l’oeil dresses with no tucking-in problems. There were also coat-macs of generous size and shoulder volume to accommodate a jacket beneath, plus all the knitted polos and judiciously proportioned sweaters a woman could wish for.This Greek-born, London-based designer only graduated from Central Saint Martins MA in 2018. Her independent business is small, but her empathetic, skilled insights are certain to take her much further.
15 February 2020