Masha Popova (Q3330)
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Masha Popova is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Masha Popova |
Masha Popova is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
“It feels much more sophisticated,” said Masha Popova of the spring collection she presented this afternoon. The reason for this sudden shift in mood? “I’m already 33! It’s time to act like an adult.” The designer is hardly ancient, especially in a business where creative directors lead successful careers well into their 80s. But a healthy dose of existentialism this season saw Popova abandon the bubblegum angst of her previous collections for more of a take-charge attitude. And so her models strode through the much-improved NewGen space at 180 The Strand in grandma-ish glasses, tweed jackets, and grown-up pussy-bow blouses. “The girls are now ladies,” said Popova.But even the most together of adults sometimes feel like teenage interlopers. A 33-year-old might purchase a pencil skirt because it seems the age-appropriate thing to do, but there will come an afternoon when she realizes the zip has been left undone since the morning. Or that her bra straps were on show during an important meeting. Or that she has perhaps been walking around the office with her dress caught in her knickers without anyone having mentioned it. Popova explored these everyday vignettes in jersey dresses with too-long straps falling around the elbows, tailored jackets with integrated capes, and half-zipped miniskirts sewn onto longer mid-length versions. “It’s all about impulsive dressing,” she said, taking inspiration from photographer Patrick Magaud’s 1984 book,Exhibition in Paris,which captured a model in various states of tongue-in-cheek deshabille. “I find it beautiful when things get stuck or don’t quite fit. It tells the story of a person’s day,” said Popova. She could have cheated these effects with styling but instead demonstrated her construction skills.The designer said she enjoys working with denim for a similar reason—for how the worn experience reveals itself in fades and stretches. And having already proven what she can do with a pair of jeans—see those signature hip-flashing boot-cuts—Popova wanted to trick the eye into seeing them just about everywhere else. Waterproof trench coats had been put through several treatments to evoke aged denim; the surfaces of tailored trousers were scraped to reveal the grain within their underlayers; and tweed jackets had been spun from indigo cotton.
Even the Adidas Superstars worn by this morning’s models—a one-off customization project with the sports giant—had been coated in different layers of bluish colors and pierced with antique brass studs. They’re not for sale, but they should be.
14 September 2024
In this 40th year of London Fashion Week, the fashion industry reportedly generates £21 billion ($26.45 billion) for the UK economy. So why, with only a few notable exceptions, does making it as a designer here remain such a hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth game? Exactly where do those “billions” connect with reality? Take Masha Popova: the Ukrainian-born designer’s first “studio” was in a dubiously-zoned garage in Bromley-by-Bow—a neighborhood that makes Bushwick look like SoHo. That territory between rhetoric and reality—the gulf dividing fashion’s perceived glitz and true grit—was the space Popova explored today. “It’s an ironic take on that fashion facade, which honestly is a fantasy that I can’t relate to,” she explained backstage: “It’s ridiculous.”Her further inspirations encompassed forms of luxury porn—once her own guilty pleasure—running from MTV Cribs toThe Bling RingviaMy Super Sweet 16.Staying true to her denim metier while expanding into other outlets for her raw and distinct talent for fabrication and treatment, Popova parodied “luxury staples” via frayed, flocked and grungily garment dyed devoré riffs on Juicy Couture-ish velour robes, vests, jeggings and hoodies. A cast of friends wore her signature bias cut cross-strap boot-cut jeans, which were bandana-belted and applied with hand-fashioned stitch-dyed tiger stripes and reptile pattern to create a garage band Cavalli effect. These were created in league with the denim producer ISKO (because every emerging London designer needs a fairy god-partner). There were more animalia and floral kind-of batiks on cotton-silk crop tops and buckle-fastened skirts.The models carried beaten brass globe baubles and wore brooches of roughly cast non-Swarovski crystal, stars and shattered chunks of tiara, all created by Popova’s jeweler friend Rebekah Kosonen Bide. Some of Bide’s last season tire-tread brooches returned—consistent with the make-do-and-mend ethos of this designer. Other carryovers included the furry shoe socks worn over Doctor Martens, while further footwear came via indie London shoemaker Roker: It would be interesting to see what anarchy she could wreak in the sneaker space. Gold dust and dollar signs were sprinkled over some pieces as a final spicy riposte from Popova to the saccharine bad-carb luxury she was messing with.
16 February 2024
The exciting, young denimologist Masha Popova accelerated and expanded last season’s petrolhead theme this morning with a two-season show that took its inspiration from monster trucks. While combining fall ’23 and spring ’24 (the one-runway-a-year consensus among London’s hardscrabble independents is gaining traction), she demonstrated several developments since last September’s circuit. Chief among them was her expansion into menswear, which was effectively an anatomically tweaked recut of her powerful signature denim: It looked great.The integration of silk and velvet into her lexicon added a fresh textural depth to her denim-dominated mix, which was also countered with jersey. After a trip to the Monster Jam truck event at the London Arena in July, Popova took her oxidized color palette of green, blue, bronze, and silver from the various “teams” that competed to crush things beneath their bizarrely oversized tires. On our benches was left a printed look book showing the cast posing by these very same trucks as empowered, high-octane pinups. As they were last season, tire treads were among the purposefully imprecise patterns (along with spirals and flowers) applied to the garments through flocking, overdyeing, rough pleating, and other techniques. Jewelry designed in collaboration with Rebekah Kosonen Bide ably accessorized Popova’s monster riff.Similarly colored, dented, and eroded Dr. Martens made an excellent footwear foil to a collection you could see being worn by a wide cross-section of youthful tribes. The fits on Popova’s male cast members, plus a diverse female casting including one pregnant model, showed the versatility of her core crossover hip-flashing cut. It would be interesting to see her experiment with alternative silhouettes within her mostly Made in Ukraine, boot-cut-heavy offer. And it would be fascinating to see the result of a Popova collaboration or consultancy with any denim-oriented monster brand that had the intelligence to tap her.
17 September 2023
“It’s got a dark energy,” said Masha Popova of the collection presented at her first-ever runway show this afternoon. Why dark? “Because there’s so much shit happening in the world generally, and in my life.” Fair enough. The Odessa-born Ukrainian native—who had returned there from London for a year until the Russian invasion in February—added: “It’s been such a stressful time that I felt like screaming all the time. Which was the starting point for this.”Popova channeled that rage into a fine and furious collection whose central motif was tire treads, the result of her imagining driving fast—very fast—with the music up high and screaming in frustration. Instead of the sound of her screams, hard to realize in clothing, it was the screech of her tires through which Popova figuratively expressed that dark energy.Jersey T-shirts with overprinted tire treads and some long jersey evening dresses that looked reverse-embossed with tire trails were two rare exceptions to the general dominance of denim. Popova said that she loves the fabric for its versatility: “It carries character, emotion, and energy. Denim can express many different feelings.” Within denim, the furious-driver detailing continued with doughnut-style spirals in washed, faded relief and in the folds of her strong-shoulder minidresses.Cleverly rendered iridescent slicks up each knee, or sometimes just in oily black, were a slight stretch of the automotive metaphor but looked great nonetheless. A superclever stitched and pleated strapless minidress combined stretch and cling to epitomize the postindustrial toughness of the collection more broadly.Popova’s butterfly top has helped her flutter into view via social media: Today she wisely offered two new variations, shaped and embroidered after a scorpion and a dragonfly. This might have been Popova’s first runway lap on the fashion circuit, but she navigated it like a pro—it will be fascinating to watch her experiments in denim develop.
17 September 2022