Mother Elizabeth
Landfills are expanding and constantly growing with post-consumer waste and mass-produced garments. As a way to tackle the problem, Hedvig Ljungstrom is upcycling discarded clothes into new looks. The graduate of the Swedish School of Textiles found that baby garments are often overlooked in upcycling, and for that reason she has based her womenswear collection entirely on baby clothing. With a keen interest in history, Ljungström’s visual and aesthetic references, on the other hand, come from the Elizabethan Era (the time of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, also known as the the Virgin Queen, and billowing dresses). Marrying garment archetypes of the era with filled and padded baby clothing allowed her to create the shape and volume of the time. Back then, pearls and beads were not only decorative and valued, they covered stains and fabric holes, and embellishments also adorn Ljungström’s collection ‘Mother Elizabeth’ that offers bulging dresses, skirts and cropped tops. Referencing the Virgin Queen in a collection based entirely on baby clothing combines an innocent almost girlhood-esque angle as well as a historical perspective: “During the process, I constantly found correlations, but there are clashes that made the synopsis between the material and the chosen time era interesting,” she adds.
