Chopova Lowena: Folklore, Clipped Together

In 2017, a buying director at Matchesfashion saw a skirt made from patchwork panels of vintage Bulgarian textile, hung off a wide leather belt with a row of climbing carabiners, and asked for thirty of them on the spot. They sold out in a day. Nobody involved had planned for that — the design had started as a university project, made because the two people who made it liked how the hardware sounded when it moved.

Central Saint Martins, day one

Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena met in 2011, their first day as undergraduates at Central Saint Martins. Chopova is American-born to Bulgarian parents; Lowena is British. They stayed together through their BA and then the MA, which is unusual in itself — most design duos form after school, not inside it — and founded their label together in 2017, the same year that skirt found its buyer.

The carabiner skirt is still the piece most people know the house by, and it's a genuinely odd object once you look closely: sportswear hardware holding together fabric that has nothing to do with sport, in colours and patterns pulled from Eastern European folk dress. Rock climbing meets a Bulgarian grandmother's linen chest. It should not work. It has sold out repeatedly for eight years.

Deadstock, and a workshop in Bulgaria

What holds the house together is less the hardware than where the fabric comes from. Chopova Lowena builds collections from deadstock and recycled textile — vintage aprons, pillowcases, remnant kilim — much of it sourced and worked with female artisans in Bulgaria, keeping traditional embroidery and weaving techniques in active use rather than in a museum case. It's a supply chain built on scarcity and specific provenance rather than repeatable yardage, which is also why no two Chopova Lowena pieces are ever quite identical.

The label was a finalist for the 2020 LVMH Prize — the same award that first helped launch Marine Serre and Grace Wales Bonner internationally — and has shown steadily since, always the same instinct at work: something structured, and something scavenged, forced to share space.

Buying it

Because so much of the material is deadstock, pattern placement varies piece to piece even within the same style — buy on the specific piece in front of you, not the styling image. Hardware pieces are heavier than they look in photos; the carabiner skirts sit at the hip rather than the waist and want to be tried on to find where the panels fall.

The knitwear and jersey pieces are the easiest entry point if the full folkloric maximalism feels like a big first step. They carry the same eye for colour with less commitment.

At ANSH46

Chopova Lowena brings something genuinely rare to the floor — craft with a sense of humour, made by two people who still do it together.

Browse Chopova Lowena at ANSH46, or see womenswear and jewelry.