Tiger of Sweden's spring/summer 2024 collection softly captures the ephemeral feeling of summer love
There is perhaps no experience more difficult to capture than that of falling in love. Yet, it’s the very thing that inspires so much art, music, literature and, most recently, Tiger of Sweden’s spring/summer 2024 collection. This is not, however, a complex or tragic love, but rather a sweet summer romance and the nostalgic way in which it lives on in one’s memory. “When you think of your memories, it’s not actually what really happened. Over the years, it goes through a filter – a kind of nice, blurry, washed-over haze,” says creative director Bryan Conway. “So you’re just kind of left with moments or a feeling of what that was.”
Practically, the starting point was the universal symbol of love: the heart. It’s a symbol that, as Conway puts it, is “sugary sweet and ubiquitous the world over.” “You don’t have to interpret it,” he notes. It recurs as an all-over print on silk sets, sweaters and a slim, knee-length skirt, its sentiment mirrored in the name of the collection, ‘Söt!’. Though the Swedish word’s literal translation is sweet or cute, it’s used as a catch-all to punctuate and react. Conway, who hails from Ireland, “picked up around the office”.
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This sweetness is portrayed in more subtle ways, too. How a strapless chiffon top catches the wind, for instance, or the hint of midriff revealed by a cropped knitted vest worn with low-slung denim. Elsewhere, tailored garments are rendered in fabric woven with metal, adding an ethereal shimmer. When the material is crushed or crinkled, it holds its shape – a memory captured.
On the flip side of the sweetness of summer love is vulnerability. “That’s quite a great thing, being vulnerable,” Conway says. “It’s like cutting yourself open and revealing your guts to the world.” Similarly, the collection emphasises “stuff that should be on the inside”; the house striped lining, for instance, becomes a wool women’s suit. Elsewhere, Conway draws inspiration from Italian artist Lucio Fontana’s iconic slashed canvases, slashing an elegant shift dress at the neck to create a sort of collar and slashing long denim skirts up the middle to create a sensual slit.
It’s a softer side of the Swedish heritage brand, one that finds the male and female looks acting in gentle harmony. A true summer romance; one to be remembered.
