Feel free to make yourself at home!
For Hodakova’s FW26, Ellen Hodakova Larsson reported that the beauty mood was a sweaty pianist completely absorbed in her music, tossing composure aside for pure, corporeal joy. But we can’t help but notice that same feeling in the collection itself, especially toward the end: a story of losing yourself in your imagination.
Picture it: you’re in a Belle-and-the-Beast–adjacent chamber, where dressers breathe, chandeliers talk, and chairs walk. You’re lonely, unbothered, unhinged, spinning with fur coats and hunchback forms like they’re your imaginary dance partners, and your only companions (or witnesses to your madness) are in the mirrors pressed close to your face.
Larsson turns domesticity inside out. Golden jacquard, velvet, rounded chair legs, wallpaper-like prints: everything is translation, objects into garments, memory into material, home into stage. Teacups become fragile bras; rugs are reinvented as capes; chair legs sprout as skirt hems and white bed sheets are reborn as dresses. The horsehair pieces are actually violin strings, winding up the body and linking at the neck. By the end, models aren’t wearing clothes, they’re inhabiting furniture in a hallucinatory chamber of repurposed objects. But the moment models took a turn in the simplified living room, bare backs and poplin boxer shorts peeked out on display: the discrepancy between the facade you put on for the real world and your vulnerable, true self in the back.
The collection recalls Hussein Chalayan’s FW00 ‘Afterwords’, where furniture also literally became fashion: a coffee table transforming into a skirt, chairs stripped and reinvented as dresses, suitcases, and accessories. Chalayan’s work explored displacement and carrying what matters when leaving home; Larsson, meanwhile, turns home itself into a stage, blurring the line between interior design and wearable fantasy.
It’s a castle of hallucinations: a princess gone mad, a pianist lost in music, and a world where furniture is alive.
Words by Pykel van Latum
