At Avavav, guests didn’t watch the show. The show watched them.

Once again creative director Beate Skonare Karlsson came up with an unexpected format, this time to tap into a social commentary around the male and female gaze in fashion.

She ostensibly invited guests to a presentation, only to stage a show-cum-performance repeated in two time slots. Attendees lined up outside what looked like the backstage of a show, before being called one by one to step into the stark venue. They soon discovered they were the models, since they had to walk down a straight runway, toward a podium of photographers and, most importantly, passing between models lined up on each side and staring at them menacingly. All the while, a voiceover featured interviews of male designers describing their female muses. 

It was an enjoyable or dreadful experience – depending on each guest’s level of confidence. The scrutiny game likely made it an uncomfortable one for many, which somewhat proved the designer’s point. 

“It’s fascinating to be a woman in an industry that is so focused on women and women’s wear and yet the female perspective is quite rare and underrepresented,” said Skonare Karlsson. “I’m not really selling anything bad or good about it; I just think it’s like not talked about enough.”

This spurred her research into the differences she notices when she dresses for other women, an act freed from performing for approval. “When I dress for women, I don’t want to be pretty. I want to be confident, special, the most interesting version of myself. There’s a different kind of power in that,” said the designer.

In her collection, this was translated into hybrid shapes, evoking the intention not to be put in a box. Tailored pinstripe pants merged with pencil skirts, simple logoed t-shirts were turned corporate-ready with a built-in construction of a tie, while basketball shorts morphed into bon-ton A-line skirts to wear with lace tops.

As always in Skonare Karlsson’s work, there was room for irony, where padded bras stuffed with tissue paper, pearls, fishnet stockings and garters nodded to clichés of femininity.

Her signature goth streetwear staples like t-shirts and hoodies with rib cage cutouts and the quirky silhouettes of wired miniskirts also addressed “the idea of femininity that is so much in the body and how we sculpt it into an ideal.”

Headed to the gym or not, the Avavav woman can also rely on second-skin track jackets and trompe l’oeil mini shorts that are part of the brand’s fourth collaboration with Adidas Original.