For this emerging Swedish brand, the streets – and the subway – are the runway
In Stockholm last weekend, a pre-spring afternoon was transformed from ho-hum to huzzah with an innovative fashion show for the one-year-old label SSON. It started on the Skanstull subway platform and continued up the stairs and through the streets of Södermalm, wrapping up at the cozy headquarters of Kvartalsrapport (the event organisers), about a five minute walk away.
The goings-on were livestreamed from iPhones from four different spots along the route and shared via Twitch so those in the studio (where Bem Subot performed a sound piece), and others, like me logging on from home an ocean away, could watch things unfold. The idea of “democratic” fashion and the need for alternatives to the back-and-forth of traditional runways have been trending topics of late. Here was an event that addressed both concerns as well as sustainability.
SON was founded in 2024 by Yulia Kjellsson and her business partner Ellinor Håkansson, with a mission of doing things differently. “We want to prove that you can do fashion without compromising. And you can work with already existing material and keep [everything that] is exciting about fashion, but without causing harm basically,” the designer explains on a call. “It’s just very interesting to see that there are no limits actually.” While there are some experimental designs in SSON’s first two collections, the emphasis is on tweaked classics – pants, tops, and coats.
SSON (meaning son of) plays on typical Swedish surnames, like Kjellsson, which “is a common worker’s name in Sweden, one that doesn’t have a very high status or is considered beautiful,” says the designer. Her desire to “to change the relationship to common names” runs parallel to what she wants to do with the line in general, which is to transform overlooked things into things that are more than ordinary. The idea is to eventually become scalable.
Though she’s always been creative, Kjellson, 34, says she came late to fashion: “It’s not something that I grew up dreaming about my whole life,” she says. When she was in her early 20s, feeling “young and lost,” the designer inherited her grandmother’s sewing machine, and things took off from there. After studying in Stockholm, she enrolled at ESMOD Berlin, graduating in 2016. Figuring out next steps was tricky; “I really want to work with fashion, but I want to do it in a way that I can really be proud of,” Kjellsson says. “I love the creating part of it, I love the craft, I love the storytelling, but I’m also very interested in politics and society, and I’m a sensitive person and very aware of the times around us and it affects me a lot. I don’t want to have a job that I feel is not contributing to a future for all of us.”
Kjellson created an interesting dichotomy when she settled on an urban setting for a collection titled Farm. She imagined the models as living in the country and “making their own stuff from things that already exist, just like I am doing with upcycling.” She’s observed a change in how millennials view city versus country life. “There is this movement to the countryside, and a lot of friends and people around me have already moved or have this longing for that kind of lifestyle…. [I think this is because the] future is very uncertain and it’s kind of scary. I think people, including myself, get this feeling that if I can own something that is mine or where I can sustain myself, that gives me some feeling of control and certainty for the future, which maybe a modern, very electronic digital city cannot offer us. I guess it is people looking for control in a time where everything seems to be changing.”
Fashion isn’t exempt from such shifts, and the AW25 season found many designers looking for alternative ways to present their clothes. SSON’s show was timed to the end of the four city season and organized with the help of Kvartalsrapport, a nonprofit run by Amanda Bellman, Simon Graf, and Laslo Strong which organises quarterly events that bring together film, fashion, and graphic design. As their studio space is small, explains Graf, “we realised we had to challenge ourselves to work with what’s already there – the public space in Stockholm. We decided to organise a runway from the closest subway station and live stream it in our studio space where the models would enter at the end. Of course there were a lot of uncertainties around this concept – people in the station or on the street could react or interfere, the stream connection could fail, and so on. But in the end I think it was that lack of control that also made it feel authentic and exciting to watch.”
See the full SSON AW25 collection below. Photos by David Neman.
Originally published on Vogue.com.