Sophia Kokosalaki (Q7681)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Sophia Kokosalaki is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Sophia Kokosalaki |
Sophia Kokosalaki is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
Sophia Kokosalaki is back in Paris for the second season after a year-and-a-half absence. As of January, she was preparing to do a runway show, but Kokosalaki, like her fellow Londoner Phoebe Philo, is pregnant, and she opted for one-on-one appointments. All the better to understand where the designer is coming from now."It's always a mix of Greece and London," she said, describing her new collection. A jumpsuit in black silk that looked like leather evoked London in the early eighties, and a fitted, long-sleeve dress in a metallic lamé tweed looked like London today, but overall we saw more of the designer's roots in this collection. A white silk blouse buttoned up to the collar above a thick leather belt and slim black pants gathered at the ankle was something she saw on a man last summer in Crete, "but with the folklore subtracted." Same goes for a draped white goddess dress that still had an edge: "Everybody's had a go at the poor Grecians," the designer said. "It's important to make it cooler."Kokosalaki has always been best known for her cocktail dresses, so the daywear felt fresh. Sweaters hand-knit by a Scottish women's collective that she trimmed in leather for added cool factor looked and felt great. And a pair of knit jersey pants had editors asking to place special orders.
3 March 2012
Sophia Kokosalaki has been off the Paris fashion week radar for more than a year, but she was back on the scene today with not one, but two collections. Koré Sophia Kokosalaki is a new, lower-priced line featuring lace handmade by Sri Lankans that's part of an Asos.com program that helps designers develop alternative revenue streams.The focus of Kokosalaki's revived eponymous collection is, as ever, dresses, and despite its short absence, it will look familiar to fans who have always appreciated her way with drape. One little number with a flourish at the neckline was made from a single enormous piece of Lurex-shot linen. The designer used the techy fabric, which was inspired by the work of the artist Henrique Oliveira, for sporty tops and shorts, and a blazer with a narrow, elongated silhouette. But it was the chiffon dresses in delicate pastels that showed off her know-how. Painstakingly designed with double construction—slim on the inside, fluid on the outside—they had a graceful look, not tight or constricting but still body-aware. Kokosalaki will bring the same dressmaker's skills to the capsule wedding gown line she's making for Net-a-Porter.
1 October 2011
Sophia Kokosalaki captured something of the late eighties' dressed-up elegance at the opening of her Fall show: a softened version of that beige-to-caramel phase of glamorously drapey yet assertive tailoring that filtered into womenswear under the influence of the likes of Claude Montana. "I was thinking of the clothes my mother used to wear when I was growing up," she said, "and about the natural forms you see in the Greek landscape."It added a personalized slant to the power-woman redux theme that's been building through Fall. Kokosalaki worked on reviving blouses, high-waisted pants, and suede cummerbund belts for her generation. Now in their thirties, her peers have moved past cramming themselves into biker jackets, jeans, and body-con dresses to wondering how to put themselves together as adults. As always in Kokosalaki's work, the ideas were filtered through her Greek identity. This time, her career-long obsession with draping produced layered, flyaway jersey dresses and a gauzy, subtle beige interpretation of her signature goddess dress—more examples of the kind of eveningwear that gives her fans an un-showy but confident way to walk into an event. Kokosalaki is never a chichi designer, and the nature influence in this collection wasn't a lushly romantic one. Perhaps the look of the shoes—a metal heel that resembled a parched husk of something organic, and the metallic embroideries on black—were an unconscious abstraction of the debris left by the forest fires that have plagued her home country. Either way, there was a quiet strength in this collection that maintains Kokosalaki's position as an independent voice.
5 March 2010
Sophia Kokosalaki's instinct for steering her talent according to the mood is a sure one. Where last season she was rocking her own version of epauletted glam biker leather with the best of them, this time she intuited the fact that something gentler, creamier, and breezier was needed. It's a credit to her that she carried it off without a lurch: All she did was tune in to the serene side of her Greek sensibility to find a personal route into pleating, draping, and a delicate palette of barely-there color.Kokosalaki's appeal as a woman designing for women is that she can pull off a young interpretation of "feminine" without being cloyingly girly. Her plissé dresses—including one in vertical pleats with sheer, flippy under-layers—and a pristine white pique shirt with shorts looked fresh, with a kick of sophistication provided by elaborate cross-laced shoes. (They had started on the drawing board as Greek sandals and ended up with sculptural "draped" copper heels.) Where Kokosalaki really scores, though, is in her sensitive but sexy evening constructs of crinkled silk and draped netting: dresses that turn to show beautiful back views of knotted tulle on bare skin. To end, she added a section of thorn-embroidered flyaway white chiffon dresses that had the cool edge her fans love.
2 October 2009
This turned out to be a strong season for Sophia Kokosalaki: It's been ten years since the Greek-born designer emerged in London, and it so happens her particular métiers of drape, leather, and rock-inspired imagery are now slap-bang center stage as live fashion concerns. "The first materials I could use when I started were leather, jersey, and tulle, because they were the only things that were easy to find," she remembers. Practice makes perfect: The collection she sent out was a natural-born, authentic take on cool, bejeweled rocker jackets and non-chichi draped dresses—a clear statement from one of the only young female voices to have a credible say on the subject this Fall.Kokosalaki's leather and tarnished-metal embroidered jackets were outstanding, with cropped shapes that emphasized shoulders. Much effort went into taking the edge off on the glam-bling front, avoiding a trashy pitfall that has scuppered others this season. Instead, her chain-mail bolero and a cognac leather biker neatly sidestepped vulgarity while raising the pulses of onlookers who like to source a special piece from someone who (for all her experience) still counts as a discovery. Other pieces—Kokosalaki's asymmetrically nipped and draped nude jersey dress, and her whipped-around black tulle veiling over lingerie slips—were similarly right in line with what grander names have been up to this Fall, and arguably just as well done. After a decade in business, things are going her way. At the end, she laughed with a rhetorical Greek shrug: "Is it time for me to stop being a 'young designer' yet?"
6 March 2009
Sophia Kokosalaki spent the summer on the island of Crete, and while there found herself thinking of Egypt. "It's not so far," she said. "I looked at ancient Egyptian costume, and there's something sixties in there you see in a lot of movies on Greek television. But, you know, it's always done in a young and ironic way." Oddly, Egyptian motifs have been cropping up on several runways this season. In Kokosalaki's case, as she promised, it wasn't exactly the full Tutankhamen deal. Mostly, it was done by allusion: a strong-shouldered jacket and A-line skirt derived from tomb paintings, the pattern on a khaki trench inspired by early hieroglyphics, and a color palette that included lapis lazuli and gold.Nevertheless, there was a richness in this collection that Kokosalaki hasn't reached for before. She's always worked with leather, but this season she upgraded, patchworking burnished gold python into boleros, vests, and a top in which a single strap literally snaked across a shoulder like a cobra tail. That more detailed extravagance is a distinct step up and away from the dark, urban collections of the beginning of her career in London, but Kokosalaki is growing up now, reaching new markets and finding herself on the brink of the stage where she can develop her name further. That quiet progress was underlined by the jewelry visible in this collection: Snake-head slave bracelets, cuffs inset with semiprecious stones, and dangling gold earrings and diadems were the first sighting of her new line.
29 September 2008
Sophia Kokosalaki designed her debut Resort collection in the grips of Egyptomania. The result? An odd pyramidlike skirt (shaped with a wired hem) and plenty of the pleated numbers for which the Greek-born, London-based designer is known. While she indulged her obsession with drape, Kokosalaki didn't neglect her tailoring skills. She rethought the trench and dug deeper into the army surplus bin with military-inflected leather bombers, which would work just as well slipped over her cocktail frocks as with a pair of black jeans from her new capsule denim line.
14 July 2008
The image of a forceful, slightly sinister form of womanhood is becoming insuppressible this season. Why? "It's the superwoman, really," said Sophia Kokosalaki after sending out her collection of shape-enhancing body dresses and dramatically sculptured lace silhouettes. "I've been inspired by fantastic art—sort of comic book, heavy metal illustrations. I thought, 'They're kind of cool, if only they had more taste!' "Kokosalaki's curvaceous matte-black dresses, cut with minute jigsaw details in the bust and sinuous straps wound around the neck and back, gave an erotic counterpoint of her own to one of the leading themes that are emerging now. She also dealt with sheer-opaque lace and organza in black dresses with intricate curliform cutouts and transparent 3-D sleeves twisted into the shape of stylized waves. It's a kind of dressmaking Kokosalaki has been perfecting for ages—one that always weaves in a consciousness of her Greek roots, visible in the minute macramé inserts she uses, or, more obviously, the lyre motif placed in the neckline of the long, sinuous gown in her finale. As a practical girl, she always gives thought, too, to something to wear for day—a couple of dark green slicker macs were good—but it's the evolution of Kokosalaki's elegant but non-chichi vision of how to dress for evening that marks her out as a talent.
27 February 2008
Scan Sophia Kokosalaki's show, and you will find—if you're keeping up out there—a collection punctuated with pieces that are spot-on for the Spring agenda. Working backward, first isolate her diaphanous, white tiered crinkle-pleated gown—an Aphrodite apparition that could propel an event-bound nymphet to a moment of quiet glory. Note, too, Kokosalaki's attention to pants. Flared may be the general way to go this season, yet few have come up with a trouser as optically flattering as the sharp, long-leggedy pair she put under her lean, skinny tank. Casting around for a jacket with an emphatic shoulder? Or a loose T-shirt dress? She had those figured out, too.Still, Kokosalaki isn't a designer who grasps at trends for the sake of it. The rest of the collection was a consistent development of her body of work—a bit urban new wave, with an underlying thread that as always wound back to her Greek roots. Thus, somehow, the signature pleated twists in the sleeves of her jackets and the raised seams in her gazar skirts referenced classical statuary, while the slouchy satin knicker-shorts and the pompom-trimmed shoes carried faint echoes of traditional folk costume. Not that it was any overt homage to her homeland. Kokosalaki is a London city-dweller with an overriding mission to present a cool, alternative elegance that, for the most part, could be worn on the street. For her, this was a softer and more accomplished step in the right direction.
1 October 2007
Renzo Rosso, the Italian fashion magnate behind Diesel, Martin Margiela, and Dsquared, was the first to push backstage to tell Sophia Kokosalaki how many important editors were at her show, and how they're rooting for her. That must've been good for him to witness, because he's recently signed Kokosalaki to a business pact under which her clothes will be manufactured in his high-standard Staff International factory near Venice, thus liberating her from years of struggling to sort out production from her East London base.Good news all round, then, and some of it is already apparent in her clothes. Kokosalaki's knack is in the balance between Greco-modern draped, pleated dresses and something cool but under-the-radar rocking in the outerwear. A giant black curly-haired lamb coat with goat-hair sprouting at the shoulder and a textured trench (silk, but made to look synthetic in the mood du jour) did the rocking, while the designer's newest dresses came in multipleated stretch panne velvet. With a business push behind her, Kokosalaki is carefully upping the luxury content of her collection while gradually figuring out how to extend her signatures to make a tight, special brand. It's not only press and buyers who are watching. One more immediate vote of approval came from Carmen Kass, who wore the best number here—an artfully twisted black satin dress. She was seen leaving the show with it tucked under her arm, singing Kokosalaki's praises.
27 February 2007