Yes it’s still raining in Glasgow. Maybe I shouldn’t be really complaining as it started only later on in the afternoon, yet it is a bit depressing as this should be summer. I do anyway have an antidote against miserable weather: I put on something that makes me feel devastatingly stylish and powerful. My favourite item at the moment is my “Kimonoat”, a creation by Swedish designer Camilla Wellton.
As in traditional kimonos, the focus in Wellton’s T-shaped and straight lined coat is not on the waist, but on the shoulders. Indeed, the fabric flows from the shoulders opening into two wide sleeves, while the intricate knot of the obi – the sash generally made of fine yards of fabric that ties at the back and holds together the kimono – is reduced to a flat obi, stylised into a minimalist bag incorporated into the coat. If studied in detail, the geometrical and rational beauty, simplicity and sobriety of the “Kimonoat”, also bears the imprint of the “everyday clothes” designed by Russian constructivist painter Aleksandra Ekster: the curved collar that makes the essential shape of the kimono is replaced by a Cossack style high standing collar and the asymmetrical fastening also evokes the Russian blouse. Perfect proportions give the coat a sense of grace, sensuality and elegance, and impart the wearer with an enhanced feeling of empowerment.
Wellton creates quirky items of clothing, think urban streetwear with a smart and clever touch and an emphasis on precise cut and carefully selected materials. “I stopped allowing my parents to get me clothes when I was around 8 as I used to hate what they chose for me,” she told me a while back in Stockholm. “I did my first suit for myself when I was 10 and, since then, I’ve always been making clothes, but I’ve also been telling myself that this is just a hobby and I never considered the possibility of really working with clothes.”
For a few years designing clothes remained a hobby for the young designer as she chose to study environmental sciences to fulfill her need to help the planet. Thinking she was perhaps a bit too sensitive to hear everyday about ecological disasters and the constant poisoning our planet and lives are going through, Wellton chose to quit her studies and, after a year in a pattern cutting course, she realised that fashion was perhaps her way to express her needs, empower herself and feel better, “When I was younger I used to have pretty low self-esteem and I could only dress in what I had done because it made me feel more like myself,” she explained me, “and I realised that the whole point of me making clothes was to make not an armour, but a sort of ‘me outfit’: I needed to have clothes that expressed and highlighted my feelings, that made me stronger, beautiful and really proud of myself.”
Throughout the years, Wellton learnt to inject her desire to empower herself into her creations and nowadays she considers them as psychological tools of empowerment. “Think about politicians, actors, priests, they all dress for power, they dress in ways that people can recognise them, but they also dress in ways that help themselves to act in certain ways,” she reminded me during our chat, “this is what I try to do with my designs as well, empower people.”
One of the favourite ways of creating an outfit for this Swedish designer is sketching it with her customer, as she usually gets influenced by the vibe a customer transmits her and the final creation is a sort of collaboration between her and her customer.
Wellton is also an organiser, she has indeed put together shows for upcoming Swedish fashion designers for a few years, earning no money out of it, but tons of experience and networking with other creative minds and buyers as far away as St. Petersburg where she has a few fans.
When we met, Wellton told me she conceived fashion as a language that doesn’t need words and movements, a language that you put on. The better grasp you get of this language, the more you’re going to need someone who can make clothes that really express what you stand for and who you are, she explained, concluding “If I can make things that can help other people realising how important and powerful they are, then it’s amazing and it’s the best thing I can do.”
Maybe I have just developed a strange obsession with my “Kimonoat”, thinking it empowers me so much that I even wear it when I need a bit of theatricality in my life and a bit of inspiration while I’m writing. Wellton shouldn’t worry, though: I only wear the matching bag she made to go with my “Kimonoat” (as she’s also an excellent accessory designer) when I actually venture out of the house.
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