Exactly a year ago I was in Stockholm. The main aim of my trip there was taking part in a conference in honour of children’s author Astrid Lindgren. The event turned out to be very interesting and rather enjoyable, and, while I was there, I also had the time to meet some amazing young designers.
One of them is Sandra Backlund. Our appointment was scheduled on the day after her return from the Arnhem Fashion Biennale. It was a Sunday morning and Sandra was tired, but she still agreed to meet me at her studio in Torsgatan. Her creative space wasn’t huge and it was also cluttered with cases containing some of her works. 
A few creations were away on photo shoots, but I still had the chance to leaf through her portfolio, and actually touch some of her best pieces. There was a cropped top - a crossover between a Spencer jacket and an upper body armour - entirely made of human hair from her “Body, Skin and Hair” (2004) collection; a pure white gigantic wool piece from “Blank Page” (2005); various crochet-knit dresses interwoven with ribbons from “Perfect Hurts” (2005) and a paper dress entirely made of hundreds of “fortune teller” grey and black origami.
Sandra’s use of different materials - wool, mirror and paper - struck me. She seemed to be using them to carefully shape the human body as if she were sculpting it. Working on a three-dimensional way is her secret, Sandra stated, indeed, she tries to build her designs with no exact plan and discovers the shapes while she is doing them.
“I try to make the materials talk one with the other,” she told me at the time. “I never plan a theme for a collection, it just happens and, after I discover it, I play around with it a lot for many days and see if it is possible to use it for the shoulder, the hips and the head in different ways, I think this is a challenging and fun way to work. I don’t know where my ideas come from, but sometimes I just get them and I kind of translate the way I work with a material into another material, I try to make them talk.”
That June morning Sandra had on her working table the remains of a few experiments she had been conducting with wood and clothes pegs. Last November I was pleased to get an email from her that proved the experiments had actually turned into reality and had been used in her collection, “In No Time”, characterised by beige wool boleros, short dresses and skirts. Sandra transformed the clothes pegs from ordinary objects into a fascinating and fundamental part of her designs, splitting the pegs, and creating out of them wooden fans, making an entire mini-dress out of them or trying to recreate with the wool the shapes she had made with the pegs. 
Just over a month ago, in April, Sandra presented her “Last Breath Bruises” collection at the Hyères Festival (she was the winner of the 2007 edition). The new collection features heavy woollen dresses in dark green, burgundy, purple and cream, characterised by imposing silhouettes. The ample and layered sleeves of the heavy knitted dresses create complicated soft structures that look like armours. 
The wool structure of the dresses highlights and alters the silhouette of the human body, creating unusual effects, exaggerating the shoulder line and emphasizing at the same time the smallness of the waist.
Sandra told me she would like to experiment one day with plastic. I’m sure she will succeed, as whatever material she uses seems to turn into something extraordinary in her hands. 
That June Sunday, before I rushed to the airport to catch my plane back to Italy, Sandra gave me a “fortune teller” origami from her “Ink Blot Test” dress with the hope I would have unravelled its secret (I've never been good with origami, even basic ones...). In the end, though, I didn’t have the heart to ruin it and kept it amongst my most prized possessions, a memento of a very enjoyable interview with a very talented young designer.
The complete interview with Sandra Backlund was published on Zoot Magazine, Autumn 2007, Issue 8.
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