To Deptford on a sunny but chilly day down by the water, and Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena are sitting by the floor to ceiling window at their shared desk in their six-month-old, gleaming new studio space. The duo — both 32 — are behind the white hot label which has been worn by everyone from Madonna to Dua Lipa and Harry Styles.
They’re both layered head to toe in the brand, a vibrant mash-up of Bulgarian folklore references twisted with modern sportswear and streetwear touches and a drop of English eccentricity, all in whimsical, punky prints and clashing colours.
Their pups, Jello (pug) and Ida (Boston terrier) are nestled on their laps. The two petite canines were half of whom they thanked on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in December where they won the New Establishment Womenswear Award at the Fashion Awards (they secondarily thanked their boyfriends).
The win has cemented their status as bona fide burgeoning London design talent, something that they’ve been carefully slow burning since an assistant buyer from Matches DM-ed them and placed an order for 30 skirts T in 2018. The blink-and-they-sell-out signature skirts — pattern-flecked pleated kilts, fashioned from recycled Bulgarian aprons hung from rows of carabiners dangling from a thick leather belt — have since been anointed cult status.
‘It was very exciting, but we didn’t expect it,’ says Chopova of the win. The duo had been sitting at a table far from the stage with all bar one of the other nominees in their category. ‘I was like, you guys, no one here is winning,’ she laughs. And yet. When their award came up, Lowena recalls: ‘I looked at her watching a camera man walk slowly up the stairs and over to the table and he bent down in front of us. Emma was like, “Why is there a camera man in front of us?”’
We were rejected, we’ve really done it our own way
The prize is a satisfying testament that there is no right path to succeeding in the fashion industry. Especially in the current, hugely inhospitable luxury fashion market.
‘We had a lot of roadblocks,’ says Lowena. ‘We were rejected,’ interjects Chopova (the two start and finish each other’s sentences, in an easy partnership), ‘we’ve really done it our own way and [this is] a sign of showing us that we did the right thing. It was a big deal for us.’
The rejections were from the expected routes of NewGen sponsorship or getting on to the Fashion East incubator programme, paths that lead to showing at London Fashion Week. Their trajectory, where they picked up enough money in small fashion prizes to keep going for a year after they graduated from their MA, was a harder slog.
Lowena worked in a pub in Pimlico, Chopova at Peckham Bazaar restaurant while they chipped away at it. The Matches order came just as they ran out of money. But what it meant was that they concentrated on the nuts and bolts of their product offering. They couldn’t afford to put on a fashion show, but the business was making money.
The duo met on the womenswear BA course at Central Saint Martins in 2011, becoming first friends commuting in tandem from south London, to enrolling together on the MA course and being accepted as only the second double act to do this (Marques’ Almeida were the first). ‘We were the only crazy maximalist people on our course,’ recalls Chopova. ‘It was cool to love Phoebe Philo’s Céline and be very slick. Everyone showed up on the first day with their summer projects and they’d all made blazers. I made fur underwear, Laura made…’ Lowena chips in: ‘a weird dress based on this story of me falling off my bike covered in bruises.’
Chopova grew up in New Jersey, having moved to the States with her parents and brother, when she was seven, from Bulgaria. They were one of the first families to legally leave the country after the fall of communism. ‘It was a huge culture shock for all of us,’ she recalls of the time when she spoke no English and had to assimilate into American society.
But fashion was an early passion, and she enrolled at Parsons in New York in the holidays for short courses. ‘I’d only heard of Saint Martins because my mum had read about Stella McCartney in a Bulgarian magazine in the Nineties. Neither of us grew up in cities, we weren’t exposed to art or fashion, we just liked old things and folklore and storytelling.’
Lowena lived in Somerset with her parents (her father a carpenter, her mother a school drugs and alcohol social worker) and sister; she went to Birmingham University for a year before transferring to Saint Martins. ‘I just liked clothes and textiles and making things,’ she remembers. ‘I knew that I dressed and expressed myself differently than everyone in my school.’
While their parents had retired when they started the company, they’ve since ‘dragged them all in’. Lowena’s mother runs HR and finance; her sister is their bookkeeper. Chopova’s parents, having moved back to Bulgaria, are both also involved. Her father helps run the business while her mother spearheads sourcing fabrics and deadstock for the collections, collating everything from ‘aprons, pillowcases, tablecloths and wall hangings to bed covers. She’s obsessed with a perfect textile.’ All fabrics are sourced before they start designing, then when they see what they have they start piecing the collection together.
Their first London Fashion Week show was September 2022; they’ve since decided to show once a year, a cost effective way to make some concentrated noise but not overstretch themselves with the bi-annual expense of putting on a show. It also means they have more time to create a moment when it does come around. Last September they unveiled their spring summer Girl’s Tear, Girls Tear (a play on words from skater slang and the Bulgarian word for lily of the valley) show in Westbourne Park’s Bay Sixty6 skate park.
The collection was an ode to skateboarding and teenage angst, coupled with a paean to the annual May Flora Day festival, held in Helston, Cornwall (‘it’s super weird and culty and amazing,’ says Chopova). Lowena’s husband is Cornish, and they went down last year to experience the festival, Chopova recording the traditional music to mix into the show soundtrack.
The street casting positions them in a category of so called diversity and an inclusive attitude to who can appear on a catwalk, and who these clothes are for. But in the reality of retail, it’s not so simple. ‘It’s hard to convince buyers, especially at the moment, budgets are so tight, no one wants to try something different,’ says Chopova. The issues crop up in quantities requested too; a store might want to buy say, one piece in a size 16, the cost of then grading the piece and the restraint of minimum orders means that it’s incredibly expensive to follow through on this.
‘So many people are like, “You should produce that extended sizing thing that you’ve done for the show,’’’ says Chopova, but in truth, the pick up isn’t always there when they do. ‘We do our own different sizes for our e-comm and try to communicate that. We’ve done adjustable sizes on the skirts, size one is for a six to a 14, size two from a 16 to a 24. We have to keep making people aware.’
They describe themselves as ‘super ambitious in the most natural way possible. We think growth and reaching targets and constantly growing is a really detrimental thing. But we’re ambitious with the quality of our work and what we’re going to put out there.’
New this season are leather handbags, structured but playful shoulder bags in poppy colours with carabiner and comb charms, which have a nod to Luella’s Noughties pieces. Next up is perfume, thanks to Chopova’s dad (Bulgaria is the world’s largest producer of rose oil). ‘My dad found this cool family-run factory and was like, “We’ve got to make perfume!” We really like to find small companies [to work with]. It makes sense because of that, we found the right way to make it, and it fits.’ Down to earth ground breaking talent, just what London should deliver.
