Petar Petrov (Q8870)
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Petar Petrov is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Petar Petrov |
Petar Petrov is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Petar Petrov’s clothes are the kind that whisper rather than shout: Meticulously crafted from the world’s finest fabrics, and always offering just the right amount of directional flair, his collections are designed entirely on his own terms at his studio base outside the four fashion capitals in Vienna. So it was a delight to see him lean into his more playful instincts this season, thanks to a deliberately absurd look book that showcased not only his fantastic clothes, but also his wry sense of humor.Just take the opening look: one of Petrov’s signature oversized leather jackets, here with slits at the side so it can be belted and customized according to the wearer, styled with just a pair of stilettos and two enormous baguettes stuffed through the shoulder epaulettes. Elsewhere, you’ll find models clutching bananas like pistols, posing with lettuces and gourds strewn by their feet, and balancing tomatoes on their heads. “Fashion doesn’t always need to be serious,” Petrov says with a grin over Zoom. “I think we need to see everything with a bit more lightness, with a bit more joy, and not be afraid of people saying they don’t like something. We should never be afraid to fail, and I think, at the moment, it’s really important to grab the customer in a more emotional way.”If there’s one thing Petrov’s loyal clientele feels towards his clothes, it’s a sense of emotional attachment—and they’ll find plenty to fall for here: breezy shirtdresses cut from sand-washed silk featuring adjustable bands at the waist to be worn higher or lower, or draped on the fly; a coat dress with a cape-like detail at the back that managed to be both feminine and strangely powerful; a new version of a hoodie that debuted last season, cut in a circular shape to protectively cocoon the body. There was plenty of killer tailoring too: not least a fabulous black blazer, styled here with a floral brooch, that featured dramatically oversized pockets that become part of the silhouette.It’s all part and parcel with Petrov’s broader philosophy, which offers a 360-degree wardrobe that can be built over the seasons, thanks to the designer’s keen consideration of how each collection will dovetail with pieces from years past. “I always see the collection as an evolution, from season to season,” he says. “The weather makes things challenging—there aren’t really winter and summer collections anymore. You can have snow in May, but you can have also 30 degrees in April.
So at the moment, the seasons need to be redefined a bit.” It’s a conclusion he reached after talking to—and trying on the clothes with—the women in his studio. “For me, it’s always interesting to be inspired by my friends, clients, and what the women around me want to wear,” he adds.The word that recurred most often throughout our conversation was “generosity:” generosity of proportion, generosity of the fabric in its drapes and twists, and the broader generosity of clothes that never feel uptight. Yet that didn’t stop Petrov from bringing in a few bolder moments at the end of the collection to reflect the more outlandish styling of the look book: a final look featured a hooded silk blouse and denim trousers in slightly different shades of a sumptuous burnt orange, like a sartorial tequila sunrise. “Personally, I like more muted colors, but I wanted that freshness this time,” Petrov says. “I wanted to let in the sunlight.”
18 September 2024
Vienna-based Petar Petrov exists outside the “fashion bubble” geographically and ideologically. Trained as a tailor, his focus is on dressing “real” women in well-considered, elegant separates that are logo-free. The industry’s current focus on marketing, said the designer on a call, obstructs people from “looking into good clothes and good quality and good materials and good construction and good proposals….” Not to worry, there’s plenty of all that in Petrov’s fall collection.In keeping with his season’s trend for the warm fuzzies there is a butter-colored shearling trench and a rust, to-the-floor topper with the rounded shoulders Petrov used throughout the line up. Another of his preoccupations was the higher-waist, which gives the effect of a longer leg. There’s a lot of leather (and a patent-leather cape coat), some of it with a hard-edged Helmut Newton-esque vibe.Just as strong and inventive are Petrov’s investigations into wovens and knits. “I was thinking also that it’s nice to create clothes that are versatile, that you can combine also in different ways, but they feel real,” the designer said by way of introducing his first look, a Japanese tweed jacket/short coat, pebbly cashmere dress, and the perfect pair of over-the-knee boots, all in warm cocoa shades. What looks like a plaid dress with a skirt tied around the waist is a shirt and skirt with sleeve details that build the gesture into the look as well as keep things light. There’s even a modern take on the trad twinset: a cropped sweater and hoodie, it’s shown with a pencil skirt for a sharp look and also with a skirt suit.There happen to be a lot ofsmokingsthis season, but Petrov’s has special resonance as it relates to place; the designer opined that his sleeveless dress and trouser set “feels like Viennese nights at the opera bar.... We want to keep the tuxedo story always in our collection because the [city] we work from is very well known for these kinds of occasions.” In a global world, these connections to heritage and to the local feel evermore special, apart, and precious.
26 February 2024
Petar Petrov likes to see his clothes outside. For the last few seasons, he has shot his look book in different outdoor areas of Vienna, where he lives, and this season, to further push the feeling of reality, all his models were photographed seemingly mid-errand. Here’s a woman running to pick up milk in a desert-sand-colored tailored skirt suit and halter bodysuit; here’s another crossing the street in a semi-sheer off-white knit skirt and blouson bomber jacket carrying a newspaper under her arm. The last one has gone to pick up the dry cleaning in a black version of the halter bodysuit, worn with a textured rib-knit skirt. It suits the label because above all, Petrov makes clothes for real life.“This season we tried to do a fresh offering on our tailoring as it’s at the core of the brand—which began with menswear,” he said on a recent Zoom call from his Paris showroom where he was gearing up for appointments. Take the opening look, a suit-inspired dress in a textural hemp, silk, and viscose blend, worn underneath an oversize jacket in the same fabric. The double-jacket effect adds a playful touch to an otherwise simple proposal. So did another suit in charcoal; an easy double-breasted jacket and matching pleated high-waist trousers, which he paired with an elongated waistcoat-dress for an elegant take on formal dressing. The same waistcoat-dress is later shown with a pair of pink trousers instead for a sportier look. (The model gives the impression she’s coming from the gym despite the fact that she’s wearing heels with a fringed detail.) Designers love to talk about how they’re thinking about women’s wardrobes, but the fact that Petrov also loves to show different ways of wearing the same garment in his look book is proof that he’s not just thinking but doing.“When we do women’s clothes, I always think about the more essential pieces, not so decorated,” he added. “The material dictates the design, and for summer it’s always interesting to figure out how to create lightness and add texture at the same time.” There are no unnecessary embellishments in his clothes, yet they aren’t wholly undecorated; rather Petrov adds emotion by the way he drapes the fabric, by seeing the way the fabric moves. Like the yellow striped maxi wrap dress in a textured silk where the stripes moving in different directions added a certain dynamism, or the simple rib-knit long T-shirt dress with an asymmetrical seam at the leg that preceded a slit.
28 September 2023
Though the recent men’s collections told us that logos are alive and well (hello, Louis Vuitton), there’s a growing awareness about the rise of anonymous, unbranded clothes. Petar Petrov is a proponent of just such sartorial understatement. He flies further under the radar than many designers, living and working in Vienna, and opting for off-season lookbook reveals rather than fashion-week runway shows, but his is a name to know. He manages the timeless/timely divide with assurance.Take his tailoring. This season’s hero suit, a jacket, waistcoat, and long skirt combo, comes in a striking burnt orange shade and its jacket is collarless. It’s bold but far from garish. The uptick in interest in logo-less fashion stems in part from an increasing sense that excess is outré. Chalk that up to global warming, to the ridiculous Y2K trend, to the fact that we’re living through a new gilded age of gross inequality, to whatever. The tide is definitely turning, but minimalism’s recent converts aren’t ready to give up the finer things entirely.That’s why subtlety like Petrov’s works at this moment. For the office, there’s an excellent shirt dress with discreet shaping through the waist, and for evening there’s a gorgeous gold lamé dress smocked from neckline to the mid-thighs, then fluid to the ankles, that has to be the most sensual yet easiest look of the resort season. This collection definitely has a sexy streak, as seen in the stretch leather biker shorts and a version of the jacket-and-panties outfit that has become a thing on the runway, the red carpet, and now even the street.“Every time I work on a collection, I’m thinking what’s relevant for me now? What do I feel is really interesting?” Petrov said in Paris, where he was doing showroom appointments. In the end, the collection was equal parts structure and slink. The jackets’ strong shoulders were reproduced on t-shirt dresses, whereas draped jersey numbers cowled at the neckline or ruched to accentuate the waist.
29 June 2023
I’ve been an admirer of Petar Petrov’s work since Vogue Runway began posting his collections nearly five years ago—the everyday chic of his tailoring, the easy-to-wear, impossible-not-to-get-noticed-in dresses, the ornamentless, simplicity of his silhouettes—but when I hopped on a Zoom call with him last week to discuss this collection, I realized not only hadn’t we met, I had no idea what he even looked like. At this moment in fashion, when personal branding has become the be-all-end-all, when it can feel like we live and die by social media, it was a rare experience, and a good reminder that the real work of a designer is in the studio, not on their feeds. That you can build a business without celebrities or influencers or fashion shows.That’s precisely what Petrov was quietly, steadily doing throughout the pandemic from his home-base of Vienna. “Our fashion is a lot about conversation,” he said on that Zoom. “We work very emotionally. It is always about the evolution of the work and the woman in mind that we have.”For fall, the evolution came in the almost architectural shape of shoulders on both suits and short leather dresses and in the body-con nip of the waist, which he achieved not with polyester but with silk net. The short length is new here—hemlines have been inching higher since the COVID lockdowns ended—but he also showed deconstructed color-blocked slip dresses that are very much part of his vocabulary. “I like that they feel you can just slip into it and it’s not uptight. I like to create freedom of movement,” he said.Petrov is particular about his fabrications. The silk corduroy is sourced in Japan—“it’s quite sharp, I like it when the tailoring has a sharp feeling,” he said. The denim, too, is Japanese, and he showed it two ways, shrunken and close to the body, or mannish and oversized. As discerning as he is, Petrov isn’t dictatorial. That goes back to the idea of collections as conversations. He’s looking at his friends—who include Elfie Semotan, the photographer and favorite model of Petrov’s fellow Austrian Helmut Lang—and he’s also listening to them.The hero piece is a coat he showed in both a Harris tweed and a street-ready leather: a trench cut very loose with almost cape-like proportions and generous sleeves, the better for scrunching up to the elbows. Everyday and impossible not to notice.
9 February 2023
Everyday clothes often get overlooked at Paris Fashion Week. Everyone talks about dreams, power dressing, latterly the metaverse; no one wants to talk about an upcoming recession. To combat this, fashion has invented a word for everyday clothes that sounds sophisticated:wardrobing. Petar Petrov is pretty good at it, making the kind of easy-chic pieces that look elegant on the hanger but really ping on the body. This writer, for instance, owns an oatmeal-hued bias-cut silk dress with a high neck and long sleeves from a previous PP collection that has gone from a 9 a.m. office meeting to a late-night dinner party to a Sunday morning baptism (not in the same 24 hours, obviously). It’s the rare designer who makes clothes that can skew sleek, then sexy, then church appropriate with a mere change of shoes.There were numerous equally versatile pieces in Petrov’s expansive spring collection today, which ranged from well-cut denim and suede to laid-back tailoring with some delicate party dresses thrown in for good measure. If some pieces leaned toward fashion’s current obsession with Y2K—low-slung suede patchwork trousers, for instance—then others had a whiff of grunge. “I like the grunge feeling—people just dressed spontaneously; it was not so forced, so styled,” said Petrov. “That’s what I like, when it looks like you just picked something off the floor. It feels more real.” When anything gets too complicated, Petrov said, he shelves the sample. He also claimed to have discarded sales results from previous seasons: “I don’t want it to be overthought, overdesigned. It needs to be light.”The highlights of this collection, which was shown in a look book captured in an old airfield outside Vienna, where Petrov is based, included a white shirt with caramel-brown stripes in a one-size-up fit (designers are feeling brown again, FYI); a lace-up denim tunic top; a sheer knit black halter-neck maxidress; a sheer ruffled minidress styled with a cozy oversized cardigan; and suede pants with a wild fringe trim. None of these items was particularly trend driven. As Petrov said, “I don’t want to reinvent everything.” But well-crafted pieces that can lift a look always have a place. His acolytes will find plenty to like here.
1 October 2022
Brown. Some colors migrate so imperceptibly from unacceptable to everywhere that it takes a little while to wake up to their newly fashionable status. In Paris, Jonathan Anderson set Loewe in a brown box. Ludovic de Saint Sernin led with it. It was at Louis Vuitton, Chloé, Miu Miu. And—as seen digitally this morning—Petar Petrov used it all over his collection.“It’s funny,” he said on a Zoom call from his Paris showroom. “Ten years ago, I remember thinking ‘brown, I hate this color’! Commercial people would always say ‘don’t do brown, people don’t like it.’ But I started using it, and now it feels right—now it’s around, and it feels cool.”Actually, the Vienna-based Petrov began showing shades of brown in his modern draped dresses and business-friendly tailoring two years ago. He doesn’t know why. There wasn’t any damascene conversion he can think of. (Although maybe it’s something to do with his Northern European sensibility, where brown-green Loden comes from? Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski said something about being inspired by that at Hermès.)Anyway, fashion’s all about having the right instincts for the time, and customers have gravitated. His nuanced use of dark brown-russet-tan-beige-ochre worked in a sophisticated way with how he oriented his fall wardrobe towards outerwear and practicality “It’s interesting, we found that keeping softness and ease still felt relevant. We wanted to be able to put things together to create this effortless ease, with pieces that have longevity,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like time for too much show-off dressing.”That essentially boiled down putting together a smart combination of narrow, boot-cut motorcycle jumpsuits, roomy coats with interesting volumes, great shearling jackets, and some of his signature draped, multi-viewpoint dresses.Petrov figures out how to take the trouble out of dressing. Wrap-over dresses with side-slit skirts don’t take any fiddly tying; drop-waist belts give the illusion of the wearer having put together turtleneck tops with skirts—or shirts and jeans—when she’s actually wearing a single garment. Not everything was brown of course. A white shearling A-line ‘hunting’ jacket was a standout. He strikes a good balance between making stuff look casual while also being pulled-together—clothes with a sense of usefulness but also, definitely, for women who know which way to go in fashion.
8 March 2022
Now over to Vienna, where Petar Petrov has been shooting his collection in the open air. “It was nice to get a feeling of lightness. You know, spring is the season I like most, because it has this freshness and you have more light, people are positive, everyone feels like it’s a new beginning,” he said. So herewith, a Petrov street scene with striding women—figuratively liberated from three seasons of confinement within the walls of a studio or domestic setting.Petrov’s followers are always after his practicality, precision, and cool, grown-up air of not having tried too hard. There’s something of the attitude of the ’90s behind his judgments about tailoring and dresses—a touch of Helmut Lang in his trouser cuts; a minimalist discipline—and this season’s cleaned-up memory of the grunge years clicks with his constituency. “For me, it’s most important that we should make real clothes that are comfortable for real people. I don’t like costume clothes,” said Petrov on a Zoom session. His touchstone is designing for women who want to “feel like you didn’t talk so much about what you’re wearing—you know, you just put it on and that’s it.”It’s a broad-ranging lifestyle-tuned collection, so here follows a selection for cherry-pickers. Double-denim shirts and wide-leg jeans (Japanese-sourced for authenticity; no synthetic stretch fibers.) Louche-yet-crisp pant suits with oversized jackets and knife-pressed boot-cut trousers. And dresses that twist conventions in various nuanced ways. One: a shirt dress with a vaguely bandanna print on it, which is subtly fitted in front and breezes out at the back when walking. Two: a twist on body-conscious dressing achieved through a diagonally-striped knitted dress, which has another balloon-creating semi-sheer slip beneath. Three: a black cotton cap-sleeved dress with an almost monastic A-line volume.Before pressing ‘leave’ on our Zoom conversation, Petrov mentioned that he was about to leave for Paris to talk about the possibility of having a physical show there in March. On the other hand, it might be just as interesting for some people to make their way to Austria to see what Petrov is doing there. Didn’t we all say that localism was an important facet of sustainability? Petar Petrov’s audience would surely be behind that.
27 September 2021
Like everyone else on planet fashion, Petar Petrov has been thinking about designing for the psychological paradoxes that are besetting women living in uncertain times: “Everybody wants to dress up, but nobody wants to show off at the moment. You want to be a bit comfortable, but you still want to look good,” he said, zooming from his apartment in Vienna. “It’s not the easiest thing to arrive at, because it’s much easier to be loud and to be overdressed. So I think it’s good if you can create something cool, with comfort and elegance. That’s my mission this season.”He’s right. His collection walks the line we imagine we’ll all be negotiating on city sidewalks this fall—of wanting to look good, strong, and feeling okay in our own skins. How do we attain that optimum state of feeling exceptional, while also fitting in? In Petrov’s book, the nuances come down to striking the right silhouette: wide pants, swaggeringly protective coats, and dresses that balance softness and structure.Putting an adult edge on clothes that give comfort in bleak times—it calls up that moment in the 1990s when grunge and Northern European deconstructionism turned to stealth-luxe minimalism, the era of cool to which swathes of Petrov’s customers will relate. Viewers of that generation will recognize something of Patti Smith in his tailored coats, the extra-long sleeves, the vague aura of underground rock star elegance. All those aesthetics have been smoothed out and upgraded into a contemporary wardrobe that is pragmatically designed, as Petrov puts it, in readiness “for whatever will happen.” It comes out of intel on what women have already been responding to in the past year, and from conversations with Petrov’s female friends. “I think we must take on the experience of being confined for a year; everyone talks about getting used to living in comfortable clothes. I think in the next year, people will not go away from that. So I think it’s good to use gentle fabrics that are nice on the skin. But I don’t want to create clothes for homewear.”What’s been selling, he says—twice as much as before corona—is knitwear. Which is why, amongst the tailoring, he’s prioritized varieties of sweater dressing. There’s a long turtleneck dress shaped like a new take on a Romeo Gigli high-waisted look; a beige cashmere sweater with ribs running diagonally in two directions; and skinny, compact tubes and shrunken T-shirt types that work with his wide pants.
There’s also a giant cashmere sweatshirt with a pile that mimics the inside-out texture of a fleece. “I’m really happy with what we achieved with that, because it’s something that is quite special, which could be really cool dressed with a skirt or oversize pants—and you’d still be thrilled if a woman walks past you and sees it. You will definitely not be someone from the crowd.”He reckons that a permanent shift in fashion is coming, as it always does after major historic world events. “And it should be about easy clothes, an easy elegance. I think it’s like when Coco Chanel came along and changed the whole of life, dressing women comfortably and showing you don’t have to wear stupid corsets and all that. Yeah, this should be something like that.”
1 March 2021
“Here in Austria, everyone’s been socializing with friends on our balconies and in gardens—the whole summer was outdoors,” says Petar Petrov, from his studio apartment in Vienna. “Now, everyone we know has been buying infra-red heaters, trying to keep it going as long as possible—I mean, it’s a little bit difficult with our winter! There are no events or big celebrations—nobody knows when that’s coming back. But women are having small dinners at each others’ places, much more often.”Enter a whole new social purpose for fashion design to cluster around: the zone of need/desire that’s suddenly opened up between red-carpet gowns on the one hand, and depressingly domestic tracksuit-wearing on the other. Petrov’s projection into next summer is pitched precisely there—at chicly-cool wrapped dresses and louchely-cut tailoring cleverly nuanced for the ways of living andworking that women are trying to adapt to, world over. “What we’re working on is extreme simplicity, in a way. The opposite of loading on details. Things that are challenging to make, but are comfortable to wear, and easy on the skin.”It’s no stretch to imagine how appropriately these clothes will feel and perform. Take it back to perfecting the pattern of a boyish shirt—as opposed to a blouse—and fluid pants, to begin with. “It’s always difficult to cut a men’s shirt for a woman, so it has a classic man’s collar, but when you wear it, it’s not so oversized that it’s big around the waist.” A pair of trousers, lower-cut on the waist, wider in the leg, trick the eye by appearing to be jeans, but are actually dusty-blue suede. That’s the appeal of offhand stealth luxury that Petrov is reinventing—a quality that went missing from fashion for too many years. Bringing that mid-’90 concept into modern consciousness is his knack. It’s readable in the long bias-cut tank dress, a column with a slit in the side matched with a hip-length jacket, in the black leather spaghetti-strap camisole he’s slipped in, the drapey slouch of wide-leg cream over-the-foot length cargo pants with an oversize safari-pocketed jacket. For rising to the occasion of some sort of socially-distanced gathering (or a summer holiday—we can dream!) there’s the closely-considered asymmetry of halters and wrapped skirts in scarf prints, a deconstructed white cotton shirt dress with ribbon ties, and so on.
It’s a whole, relatable, wardrobe of options, really—a positively uplifting sight, while being absolutely down to earth about the situations that Petrov’s women of the world are finding themselves in. The neighborhood observations he took from his studio balcony during lockdown stretches far further than Vienna.
26 October 2020