This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:

Ellen Hodakova Larsson is a fuzzy image on a screen. She’s dialling in from the Swedish countryside where she was born and raised and the connection isn’t great. “I’m aiming to have my own stable in not too long,” the 32-year-old designer says. “It’s one of my dreams to get back to some kind of farm life.” It’s not your usual fashion patter.

Larsson’s clothes aren’t usual either. Designed under the label Hodakova (named after her grandmother), they’re recycled and proudly sustainable, an ideology that has become an overused fashion cliché of late. But rather than deadstock fabrics, Larsson rips pieces apart and reworks them, splitting and hoiking up old trousers to be a dress, sewing a shirt together into a playsuit, weaving a slightly naff bunch of gaudily buckled discarded belts into a handbag (that’s a bestseller). She gets crazier – for her Spring/Summer 2024 collection, several thousand plastic pens were stitched, magically, into clothes that replicated the texture of fur. For this Autumn/Winter season, an attaché case was unzipped to form a strapless leather dress bristling with pockets, satin ribbon equestrian rosettes erupted from the surface of a rectilinear gown, and a pair of silver serving platters were crushed around a torso to create a bustier. “The communicative pieces” is how Larsson describes those outré examples, which aren’t made to be bought in great numbers, of course. But other items are sold through her website, in a variety of sizes – some in stock, some available on demand. Each is marked as a unique piece, “and can therefore slightly vary”. They are also sold through global retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman in New York, SSense and the Dover Street Market collective. “And Murkudis and Joyce and Antonioli … I don’t remember all the names,” Larsson says. There are almost 20 in total worldwide. Showing in Paris, she has achieved international acclaim, including a nomination for this year’s LVMH Prize and a collaboration with Gucci.

All the above is remarkable, given how difficult a ‘sell’ sustainable, one-off pieces were seen to be even a few years ago. For Larsson, however, it was essential that her label wasn’t just a small-scale art project, but a sustainable (that word again) business. Early on, she devised a framework to be able to scale her operation: although she has an in-house production team at the label’s base in Stockholm, she works on every prototype piece and executes many of the “communicative pieces” herself. She also works with second-hand partners to source, say, enough black wool-polyester trousers in similar styles to be able to reproduce her first offering with sufficient verisimilitude to satisfy retailers and clients alike. She has recently begun to work with AI to try to accelerate this sorting process. “I really believe in this process,” Larsson says. “And we need to force it to happen.”

The ideas aren’t just central to Larsson’s working practice: they’ve always been part of her life. She grew up an hour from Stockholm on a horse farm – she has been riding since she was ten. Her mother used to make clothes for her and her brother; her father was in the military, which alongside her own experience in dressage, gave her a respect for clothes, for uniforms, well-shined boots, brushed cloth. “You just took care,” Larsson says now.

“We grew our own food so we could afford it in a better way. We had a lot of apple trees, we ran barefoot with the horses. And just tasting the different apples – depending on what variety the apples were, they have different times, they are better for different occasions.” She pauses. “It’s not about consuming, it’s about valuing what’s around and creating the environment you want with what you have.”

That is, of course, what Larsson does with her clothes – they connect with her own educational background and her own urges to invent her wardrobe. “It’s definitely autobiographical in that way,” she says, explaining that as a teenager she spent her time digging around in the family attic, reworking her mother’s old clothes – cutting, reprising, a suit becoming a dress. “I wasn’t really interested in making it at that point,” Larsson says. “But it developed when I was studying painting and sculpture [for her foundation year at the Swedish School of Textiles at the University of Borås] – that was more about me understanding why I had this creativity. And I understood that I sculpt more on the body than as physical objects.”

Individuality is key to what Larsson does. She’s interested in the stories that clothes can tell – and in stories in general. Halfway through our interview she seizes control, asking questions about my clothes, my collecting. Not so much the what, more the why. She asks herself the same questions when she’s using pieces that have, as she puts it, a story to tell. “It’s some kind of sentimental value that’s the focus. What kind of life this piece has been living through,” Larsson allows of her recycling and regenerating. “These pieces connect you to an era or a time in general, or a person. And I feel like, press-wise, when we lend things to celebrities and they come back, it’s like, ‘Oh, I wonder what Rihanna smells like?’” She laughs.

Larsson’s clothes are interesting because, although deeply steeped in notions of sustainability, they never appear holistic or hippyish. They’re sharp and urban, even if they’re produced by a woman yearning to live on a farm. There is, however, a decidedly utopian bent to Hodakova, and to Larsson’s belief in sustainability. She doesn’t see this as an isolated experiment, rather as a gateway to changing how the fashion industry operates. “If it’s not for real – if it’s not a global take on it that’s actually bringing in all of the factors that we need to change the system – then I wouldn’t do it,” she says. “I think it’s mainly just a change of mindset. And to be able to change the mindset, we just need to believe in it. I think that will also force people to believe in it. And that’s the inspiration, what I’m hoping to be part of in various ways.”

Larsson also practises what she preaches. “I never buy anything new for myself,” she says. “If I need a skirt, then I’m like, ‘Oh, I need to make a skirt.’ And then I say, ‘Oh, let’s put this in the collection.’” I ask if she buys vintage. “I do,” she says. “But then something happens … ” Those end up in her collections too. Even then, rather than buying vintage she swaps, exchanging items – which she recently did to acquire 40 pairs of old leather riding boots. She proudly brandishes one on camera – “How beautiful is this?” she asks. She’s figuring out what to do with them next. 

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.