Growing up in Berlin, designer Laura Andraschko didn’t just like fashion. How she felt about costume, clothing and the stories told through it was more of an obsession. That might sound extreme, but Andraschko is all about extreme, from hedonism to chaos, breakdowns, rehab and relapse, the characters she creates in her collections would never be comfortable in the back seat. They’re driving the car, probably without a licence.
Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2021 and now working towards her fourth season, Laura has channelled this obsession into a nostalgic vision of anarchic femininity. Sharp, wide shoulder pads sit aggressively at the top of deceptively demure mini dresses, skinny varsity sweats replace the college name with the word ‘MEDICATED’. There are nods to classic Chanel tweeds, Cory Kennedy, club bathrooms and cocaine nights. With a fixation on 2010 as the last era of true hedonism – “it felt so different then, now everything is super corporate” – her muses are pretending to DJ wearing tiny metallic hot pants, last night’s liquid eyeliner and not much else. It’s only right that Mark Hunter aka The Cobrasnake shot her latest campaign. “I’m so drawn to that time,” Laura tells me. “It felt freer and wilder. Now everything is so restricted, it’s boring. Now the It girls are at home making videos.”
There’s far more to her designs than pure nostalgia, though. An early fascination with tailoring led Laura to apply for an internship at Ann Demeulemeester when she was just 18, making her one of the youngest interns in the brand’s history. Sneaking away from Product Development, the department she’d been assigned to, she would hole up in the pattern making department with a tailoring master she’d befriended, learning everything she could. She went on to do further placements with a hugely inspirational costume designer friend of her parents, another at the Berlin Opera, and finally at Lanvin. Taken together, a clear series of influences within her singular vision begins to emerge: glamour, storytelling and extreme tailoring. “I’m obsessed with distorting the body in a particular way,” Laura says. “I like to lower the hip line and elongate the torso to create quite awkward-looking silhouettes.” She cites indie musicians standing with knock-knees as a specific inspiration here, a subculture she’s loved since her early teen years spent in brogues, Cheap Monday skinny jeans and vintage blouses.
The journey to her fourth collection hasn’t been entirely straightforward. Dropping out of a Berlin fashion school – “I felt very misunderstood” – Laura applied to Central Saint Martins, and while it was a far better match, “the first two years were very confusing, I kind of had no clue what I was doing.” In a strange twist of fate, when the Covid-19 lockdown happened and people were forced inside, everything fell into place. During that time, Laura identified the person she wanted to design for, how she wanted her clothes to feel and be worn. “She’s this anarchic girl who I see myself in as well,” she shares, “I’m not the biggest fan of very curated looks, I like people to really wear something. Throw it on the floor. Do whatever with it. Just like, live in it. The most important thing is authenticity.”
A refined graduate collection followed and then her “Skater ballerina” collection for SS23 which was something of a breakthrough. Here, and in subsequent collections, her playfulness and ability to create compelling characters and narratives with clothing has come to the fore. For AW23, her muses were holed up at The Priory after one too many nights spent scratching the walls at Le Palace in Paris. Her next collection promises another, entirely new take on glamour: “Well, OK, she still parties… but she parties in a different way.” There’s true brilliance in how these diverse characters exist in different corners of the same world. With each collection, Laura further demonstrates her skill as tailor, designer and storyteller, maintaining a throughline of consistency – that precious thing, so often overlooked, called having an actual vision.
This season, Andraschko called on the iconic 00s party photographer Mark Hunter to shoot her campaign, a creative collaboration that couldn’t be more perfectly matched. “I was DMing with Mark after he shot Meg Superstar Princess in one of my graduate collection looks and we really hit it off workwise.” The collection was born out of personal experience as well as the endless glamour of off-the-wagon It-girls. “After SS23 I was feeling really down and basically didn’t realise two months had passed. I looked around me and couldn’t see the floor anymore.” She took this idea of ricocheting between “completely hedonistic and mega low” and turned it into her next collection, which is split into two corresponding narratives. First, there are the hospital gown-inspired floral prints and “stained” jersey classics, unapologetically glamorising The Priory in a way the British press has been doing for decades. Then, running counter to her deeply ironic take on athleisure are glittering party dresses adorned with sequins, metallic musical notes and tiny puffball mini skirts.
After checking her muses into rehab, I wonder if we can expect a reformed protagonist next season, but good girls don’t hold much traction in Laura Andraschko’s world. “I’m fed up with everything today, everyone has green juice mania, it really is the clean girl era,” she laughs. “I can’t hear it anymore, I’m not a clean girl!” And with that, I left her world of intoxicated, intoxicating sirens but not without a hunger of my own: here’s to a little more after-midnight glamour, and a little less skincare. The Clean Girl era is over. Do not resuscitate.
Credits
Photography Ivan Ruberto