Rodebjer (Q9054)
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Rodebjer is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Rodebjer |
Rodebjer is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
It’s been seven years since Carin Rodebjer was in New York, the city where this Swede started her brand, and lots of memories came rushing back to her. “I started sewing and then people would stop me in the street and were like, ‘Could I buy that for my store?’ It’s quite amazing the journey the brand has been through, from those baby steps to this,” she said. “It’s so much bigger now, a totally different thing, but still the same. It’s a very sweet story in a way.”You can always count on a Rodebjer collection mixing tailoring with a touch of the bohemian—the hippie ideal, the designer wrote in her notes, is core to the label—and some sort of art reference. For fall, she worked with the Swedish artist Carl Johan de Geer, who, she explained, chose the artistic life over the aristocratic one. One of his designs, a sort of abstract floral dating to the ’60s, was used in many ways. “I wanted to do a raincoat that makes you happy when it rains,” said Rodebjer of a poncho. It was also used on knits, patterned stockings, and embroideries. De Geer’s style of photography even set the direction for the lookbook. It’s nice to see such a collaboration develop in ways concrete and interpretive. Rodebjer returned to Sweden a while ago, and this collection was a reaction to the minimalism that’s so prevalent in her home country. If the vibrant local art scene of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t fade to gray, maybe Swedish fashion would look like this part of the collection did.The designer grew up on a horse farm and there were non-literal Western elements in the collection; jeans, a waxed coat with a scarf, topstitched footwear, and a boiled wool jacket with leather pockets. Rodebjer also explored business attire: an elegant Prince of Wales check coat with a scarf, and the return of the skirt suit. Those were only some of the many subgroups within the collection. It mixed various narratives that read true to Rodebjer’s experiences and brand, but it’s easy to lose the plot with so much going on.
13 February 2023
Carin Rodebjer is a fashion veteran who has opted out of the traditional runway format in order to explore new ways of working, communicating, and evolving the brand she founded in 2000 in New York. Now based in her native Sweden, Rodebjer’s focus for the last few seasons has been on finding ways to work more responsibly. “We have pushed this to where we’re about 75% better fabric choices,” she says when we meet in her showroom. “But most of all we want to do wearable, beautiful clothes.”The key to understanding Rodebjer’s spring’s line-up isn’t a garment, but the brand’s new retro sneakers. The designer has been on the move, and all that action has given the collection an unexpected sporty feel. Nylon was a key material at the spring shows in Copenhagen, and Rodebjer has used it to make the requisite cargo/jogger of the season, as well as a blouse and coat with drawstrings at the waist and a pussy-bow at the neck. Other active touches included bike shorts and a hoodie with a crocheted varsityRand drawstrings. Crochet is also used for an openwork fringed top with a resort feeling, which also resurfaces in a print inspired by the work of the Italian artist Carla Accardi, done on terry.Alongside these sun-infused and sporty pieces are the easy city staples Rodebjer is most known for, like a white pantsuit, oversize blazers to wear with bias-cut silks, a trench and miniskirt with ribbon-laced edges, and a smart jacquard logo coat. A pair of knitwear sets felt too retro, and seemed to exist in limbo between resort and sport without being either. There’s no connected narrative here, instead the line-up reads like a collection of postcards from various sun-lit get-aways.
1 September 2022
At the same time that new talents and labels are coming up in Stockholm, there also seems to be something of a lull. Blame the pandemic. Carin Rodebjer decided to sit out the season to focus on sales and reduce stress for the team. “We’ve been focusing on the work internally and trying to find new factories who can help us become more sustainable, and also just take care of each other and ourselves a bit,” she explained.This designer is a bit of a fabric obsessive and has always been pro-pattern. For fall, there’s plaid, paisley, and a cow print to choose among. The latter is rendered in recycled wool jacquard; there is also a wooly statement coat, aka a cow in sheep’s clothing. Rodebjer describes this hero piece as “Gotland meets New York.” (Gotland is Sweden’s largest island; recently the rustic enclave has become remilitarized as tensions in the Baltics rise.) As Rodebjer has lived in both places, it might be the collection’s most biographic design.Black and white tweeds worked into a long dress and a chic suit with a very mini-skirt, have a nouveau-Coco feel. Rodebjer said she’d been spending a lot of time with her daughter and seeing how young women view the world and fashion today. There is a sense of (re)discovery of wardrobe classics—cut shorter and closer to the body—throughout the collection.The sleekest designs are the ribbed knits and leggings made in collaboration with Swedish Stockings, a sustainable local brand. “It was fun because me and [the founder] Lynn, we have the same values and the same dreams when it comes to sustainability,” Rodebjer said. Trim and easy, these pieces looked forward, not back.
9 February 2022
Spring in the city is the mood Carin Rodebjer aimed to capture this season. “I’m trying to be as constructive as possible,” the designer said. And she means it: There’a a soft yellow sun patterned mini-shirtdress here as well as a cheering pink and white check pantsuit. The latter is the collection’s hero piece and an exemplar of the sort of “elevated reality” that Rodebjer says defines her brand.“I wanted to do a collection where you go out and do what you’re supposed to do,” the designer stated. Military details add a slight touch of guardedness, but overall these are positive clothes for life beyond lockdown and isolation. “I want to design a wardrobe for women to live real life in,” she said, and that’s the clear destiny for pieces like a white seamed dress or a trench coat. A knit pants set of the sort that is showing up frequently in Copenhagen is trendier.The softness of the collection’s watercolor print is balanced with the harder edge of a jacket made of recycled leather, a material Rodebjer was directed to by a like-minded designer. Solidarity and sharing of information is essential if fashion is going to address the environmental crisis, which has increasingly become “the full focus” of this designer’s work. (It’s also one of the reasons she chose to do a film rather than a runway presentation.)According to Rodebjer, customers are asking for sustainable options. But at the same time we know that people buy what they love. This is one of fashion’s catch 22s. The good news is that the quality of the sustainable materials available is improving. “When I started [working responsibly], everything that was sustainable was so ugly, but today it’s growing and getting much better,” she says.Rodebjer is putting a lot of effort into finding sustainable materials, but she understands that the topic extends way beyond fabric choices. To that end she’s looked at her business holistically and has started producing fewer collections and reducing travel. She’s also willing to find new relevance in existing materials and designs, explaining that she reissued the sandals the models wear in the video from an old design that was “a little bit ahead” of its time. “That kind of says a little bit what Rodebjer is about,” she explains, “that you can actually wear styles from the past and combine them with styles from now.” Sounds like a good definition of the “new normal” to us.
10 August 2021
“I like to do clothes that are easy to wear, but add my kind of twist or bizarreness” to them, said Carin Rodebjer on a call from Stockholm. This season she extended that philosophy to documenting her collection, engaging a Parisian photography duo, Chaumont-Zaerpour, who shoot with film. Their images, plus some moving ones, were then made into a video. The combination of analog and digital worked; it’s also a metaphor for how we’re all getting through this pandemic.Rodebjer says she’s trying to stay focused on “constructive things” (which explains her “LOVE” sweaters, an homage to Yves Saint Laurent’s posters). She welcomes the long-needed changes that the crisis has put into motion in the fashion industry, especially around sustainability. Her fall collection includes recycled leathers as well as wool jacquards, among other “green” materials.The main conceit is a Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities where collectors gather their most precious objects. It speaks to the designer’s aim of sticking, as she said, to “my own idea about things and not about the outer world.” The concept provided the framework within which Rodebjer gathered some functional wardrobe staples, including oversized blazers, puffers, and dresses, one in an archival hustle print and the other with a “life wheel” flower, a symbol of the circularity she is striving for in her business.Without a doubt, the collection’s “hero” was a blue and white statement coat with furry collar that was neatly paired with cigarette pants. It’s a standout look in more ways than one. In this collection, conceived of as a gathering of standby garments, there are a number of pieces that “sing”—but not in unison.
4 February 2021
Crafts have proven to be healing practices during coronavirus quarantines. For many of us, Carin Rodebjer included, making something while stuck at home awaiting an unknown end to a still mysterious virus has been a form of therapy, something to help keep the hands busy and the mind sharp. Rodebjer’s spring 2021 collection underscores this idea, but the clothes she’s designed provide a different kind of escapism. There are certainly easy, comfortable garments to wear at home—a cozy, sleeveless knit dress, oversized cotton drawstring shorts—but much of the new lineup begs to be worn outdoors, whether at a social gathering in the city or a get-together at the beach.Rodebjer’s sculptural outerwear looked particularly lovely, as did a white collar shirtdress and a fitted, asymmetric printed dress. The designer incorporated upcycled fabrics from her own archive into the collection, which resulted not in a DIY aesthetic but in something more polished and sophisticated. While the introduction of a monogram felt slightly off for the brand, Rodebjer was smart to give her customers a lot of beautiful handcrafts. All in all: a collection of clothes that are unfussy, look great, and feel good.
11 August 2020
Greeting fans and friends backstage after her show, Carin Rodebjer had two words to describe her latest collection: “elevated reality.” It was also an homage to Pablo Picasso’s surrealist paintings of women and ceramic sculptures. The clothes spoke to both ideas in a captivating way. You could imagine a gallery owner building her own enviable uniform using Rodebjer’s clothes; they’re smart. The models who walked the runway appeared confident and comfortable in their looks. They could have been heading to work in the navy trousers and black turtleneck combination, or to a power lunch in the black and white swirl-print frock.Rodebjer threw in some evening-appropriate pieces too, including a silky black turtleneck dress with a black beaded mini vest strapped tightly at the shoulders. A long black tent dress with embellished straps capped off a winning collection. Rodebjer has a good sense of how women want to dress these days. It’s about ease and comfort, but also style and substance.
31 January 2020
Today in Copenhagen Carin Rodebjer showed her designs on a runway for the first time in several seasons. It was a reminder that her clothes—typically textural, usually fluid, and always balanced between practical and adventurous—look best in motion. There’s nothing rigid or overly precise about Rodebjer’s hand, and this was especially true of her new collection for Spring, which thematically blended modes of dress in Marrakech (tunics and scarves) and New York (suiting and knits).Though she went into her archives for draping techniques and textile fabrics she’s used previously, the clothes didn’t feel old or tired. The most modern aspect of the tailoring was the brilliant monochrome grouping of fringe pieces. Hemlines were kept intentionally long or came only up to the shin since the aim, as Rodebjer wrote in her show notes, was to create “slouchy silhouettes touching the earth.”This was a focused collection, save for the sheer, blush pink banded skirt and scarf top detailed with silver metallic strips, which was too close to a traditional Moroccan silhouette in a fabric that didn’t resonate as compellingly as the loosely woven knitwear or the cool hybrid short-pant suiting. Rodebjer did well with the mustard-colored tufted outerwear, along with a beige oversized trench detailed with brown leather at the collar, but the standout was a lovely print she developed in her studio. The pattern of pomegranate, fig leaf, orange, rosemary, and verbena drew its aesthetic from Arabic gardens.
7 August 2019
“I have an eye for interesting women,” said Swedish designer Carin Rodebjer. The feminist artist Judy Chicago, robotics scientistDanica Kragic, and Rodebjer’s own mother have been the starting point for collections that customers have come to rely on for accessible, stylish clothes that fit seamlessly into busy, multifaceted lives—like the ones of the women who inspired them.Rodebjer’s poster woman for Resort was Rosemary “Ro” Woodruff Leary, who was experimenting with psychedelics prior to marrying and working in partnership with husband Timothy “Turn on, tune in, drop out” Leary. Rodebjer explained that she’s repeatedly drawn to the “combination of brains and looks” she’s found in American counterculture. Woodruff Leary’s connection to the hippie era was most clearly expressed through maxi bohemian silhouettes, crafty denim, and poppy (the source of opium) prints. The leap from that to a ruffly “3D floral” LBD makes sense when Rodebjer explains her thought process, though it’s more of a jump on the rack. Less cohesive than past collections, the single faux-fur piece and cobweb knit felt a bit like uncompleted thoughts, but there was news here in the body-consciousness of lettuce-hemmed mesh dresses, see-through lace, and a melon-green evening ensemble with a leg-revealing slit. It would be interesting to see Rodebjer iterate some of her favorite fuller dress silhouettes as jumpsuits or, on the basis of that unexpected cocktail number, tunics that could be worn as minidresses or layering pieces.
1 July 2019