Feben is Designing Clothes for 'Weirdos'

FinancialTimes.com by Charlie Porter April 5 2023

“I like messing with people’s heads,” says Feben. “Who’s the person that I want to wear my clothes? Eclectic, radical, curious. Yeah, I like weirdos.”

The 33-year-old London-based designer, who goes by her first name, has gained attention for her flair for shape and print since she graduated from the Central Saint Martins MA in 2020. We are sitting in Feben’s live/work studio in Dalston, east London, her black cat Sky prowling around us. Behind her is a mannequin wearing one of her signature Twist looks: ruched pieces that have been shirred with elastic thread. Every so often, the fabric is suddenly left untouched, causing lumps like growths to form. The three-dimensional effect is beguiling and individual, each piece different. It is also immediately recognisable, a rare boon for a new brand.

It was a technique Feben developed on her MA. “I was always broke,” she says, “I couldn’t get nice clothes, so I messed around with old clothes, making textures. Then it was like, ‘oh, it looks expensive’.” There is an organic, grown-from-earth quality to the resulting clothes. Take a long-sleeved black minidress from her autumn/winter 23 show, the shirred satin forming diamonds centred down the sternum, each resulting lump in a regular pattern, yet taking its own shape and form.

“Even if it’s cut symmetrically,” she says, “when you walk it has a different shape. When you have movement with texture, it creates something beautiful, like, ‘what is that person wearing?’”

Feben had a displaced upbringing. “I’m from Ethiopia, but I grew up in Sweden with my mum,” she says. They lived in refugee camps in her first years in the country, in many places. “We ended up moving to a small town in the southern part of Sweden, where my mum still lives now.”

Her experiences, and her mother, profoundly inform her work. “She used fashion as a tool to express herself, because she didn’t speak the language,” says Feben. “When you’re a kid, you just want to be like everyone else, but I was black, in a small town, we were the only black people there, it sucked. I remember being like, ‘why can’t you dress like the Scandi women?’ Now, I am very grateful for what I am and what I have.”

As a teenager, Feben was already making or customising her own clothes, unable to afford the labels her friends were wearing. Keen to get out of her small town and study, she won a place at a high school with a special programme for fashion and textiles, then moved first to Sydney, then to London. “I was so broke, I had £70. You have to have a fair amount of delusion.” It’s an attitude she has inherited from her mother. “I don’t think she would take a ‘no’,” she says. “She would always try to make it into something else. If she took a ‘no’, things would have gone really badly for us. It makes you a stronger person, to be resilient.”

This all goes into her work, stocked at stores such as Ssense and Browns Fashion. “I guess it’s an exploration of my identity, what I’ve been exposed to, and what I stand for,” she says. Feben’s work with shape is about more than silhouette. It is also optical, with flat prints that can feel three dimensional in the way she layers her images. For her current spring collection, she placed tarot card imagery over text as if torn from Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. “I love intellectual sexiness,” she says. “If you read the words, you get a nice surprise. It’s really sexy.”

There are further explorations of overt shape in her autumn/winter 23 collection, with padded scarves that thread into themselves, and padded zip-up jackets, both studded with buttons like a leather sofa. “I was thinking about armour and vulnerability and strength,” she says.

In her studio is other work in three dimensions. On one wall are a framed series of dolls made by Feben in 2020, each wearing a look from her MA collection. That year, she made a print of the dolls for a T-shirt to raise funds for the mental health charity Black Minds Matter. On another wall is an entirely blue work, a painted canvas with coils of painted fabric attached, as if held in motion.

Feben made the work in 2022, after a relationship ended. “I always wanted to make paintings,” she says, “I thought it would be a nice break from crying to be honest. I’ve always loved cobalt blue, it kind of represented where I was, the darkness, but cobalt has a brightness to it, and if there’s no light, there’s not much hope.”

It was all related. “Mixing media and creating 3D silhouettes has always been a part of my practice, whether it’s in fashion or art, creating layers,” she says. “I like to keep people curious — including myself.”