Everyone’s already bought into the fact that Chopova Lowena are great—you only had to clock the number of people who swaggered into their first runway show at London’s Porchester Hall swirling their signature multi-pleated carabiner-suspended kilts to know that’s real. But wow! The driving energy the designers unleashed on the runway, personified to the max by their gang of friends, family, collaborators, and street-cast models stomping through a loud cacophony of Bulgarian folk song, Lacrosse-match cheering, and metal music—it was a grade A moment better than even their super-fans could’ve hoped.
“We had three months to fit everyone, so they all felt perfect. Right space, right sound, a great experience emotionally, a different way of walking,” Emma Chopova declared afterward. “A different take on the classic show, right?” Standing next to her, Laura Lowena chimed in: “Yeah, we wanted to make sure the time was right, that we could really create the Chopova Lowena world for everyone to see. And I think that waiting was the right thing to do. Especially after such a quiet few years, it felt amazing to bring people—our community—together like this.”
The impressive part was to see everything Chopova Lowena have been building up through their lookbooks and videos come to life, confirmed as a fully formed multiplicity of looks, prints, denim, tailoring, skirts over dresses, metal jewelry, tinsel knits, with mad-cozy boots, hand-drawn cartoony artwork, cotton armlets, and all. It’s all completely coherently styled and identifiable, yet simultaneously it looked as if each person was having a good time walking around in their own clothes. Men owned kilts and uniform skirts with conviction for the first time since Jean Paul Gaultier in the 1980s. Although, Lowena firmly pointed out, “we don’t really think in terms of men and women. We think of people.”
The part of Emma Chopova’s background that’s well known is that she’s Bulgarian, and brought up in America; hence the brand’s effective supply chain. This collection paid homage to the Rose Festival, a pageant which takes place in Kazanlak, the village in central Bulgaria where Chopova’s ancestry is rooted. There were riffs on rose-forms in prints and cuts; a backpack became a whorl of petals.
Sport—the other source of Chopova Lowena’s brand identity—showed up in homage to Lacrosse, which Chopova played at school in Bridgewater High School in Somerset, New Jersey. “It was a very big deal in high school, what the cool girls did—which was very much like what I wasn’t,” she laughed. The Lacrosse references turned up in mad tinsel versions of college team vests with CL logos and the big tinsel-furry boots. Somehow, fierce sounds of cheering and shouting on the soundtrack added grit to the collective atmosphere of the whole joyous thing.
Lowena—the sporty one, starting from her school in Somerset, England—put her finger on that. “The thing about playing sport at school was that people were always sort of accepting—you were doing an activity in which you had to be a team. It pulls people together who are like, really different or already the same,” she grinned. “And so, different people come together.” Then both designers nodded in unison. That was the Chopova Lowena team spirit that came over so strongly in the attitude of the band of supporters who’d stomped around their runway. “And they killed it!” laughed Chopova. “They did!”
