Petra Fagerström: From Figure Skater to Fashion Designer

It was a sheer twist of fate—a triple axel of serendipity, really—that Petra Fagerström was finishing up her collection just as the figure skater Alysa Liu was taking gold with her astonishing performance at the winter Olympics. Fagerström is a Swedish designer whose solo debut at London Fashion Week was a crystallized memory of competing on ice as a child prodigy.

“It was truly surreal to watch that happening at the same time,” she exclaimed after sending out a meditation on the style and character of the woman coach. “I was a figure skater in Gothenburg from when I was five or six-years-old to 16, then gave it up when I got into fashion, making clothes.” In her mind, she was concentrating on combining “outerwear and something sparkly—that’s really my aesthetic, my language. There’s so much fun stuff you see in a rink, like what my coach would wear. Always all white, or all black Moncler with these furry boots.”

In her Central Saint Martins MA show, Fagerström established a strange, compelling dialogue between old-fashioned haute couture silhouettes and AI. Her “double-fronted” jackets, a signature carried over for fall, came about through an AI glitch when it couldn’t tell the difference between a Dior Bar jacket and an anorak. The reveal of inner structure and glam within a winter puffer just happened to look amazingly desirable. So too the marrying of warm-up clothes and shimmering sequin dresses and tabards, and the strange lenticular mirages that appear and then blur out on Fagerström’s printed pleats in movement. (The fake furry trims were made of Biofluff, a product made of natural fibers.)

The haughty stance of the models—they stood in a line facing the catwalk, and watched on critically as each performed her walk past them—hinted at Fagerström’s deeper psychological reckoning with the coach-skater dynamic. Her original inspiration board had inevitably featured a lot of Tonya Harding imagery; a glimpse of the floral leotard she once wore was replicated in the rose-and-hydrangea tapestry prints on coats and jackets. Still, in her press release, Fagerström made it clear she wanted to counter the mythology of the monstrous toxic mother-coach. “I wanted the collection to grow from empathizing with her, rather than villainizing her.” That didn’t prevent her naming the collection “After Everything I Did For You.”

But watching the spectacular skating at the Olympics, did Fagerström find herself missing it at all? “I did—parts of it,” she admitted, smiling. “But it’s a very similar feeling to making a collection, actually. It’s like skating a program on the ice: it’s the speed, and being so strong feels really good. It’s a very brutal sport, but at the same time it has this flow, and you’re kind of floating around, and there’s a feeling of incredible growth.” An athlete’s training could be good practice for fashion in the long run. And in the short run, too. Fagerström, who has already captured a lot of attention with her earliest fashion performances, has been selected as one of this year’s cohort of designers by Paul Smith’s Residency. That gives her free studio space and business mentoring.

And in just a few days, she will also be contending for the LVMH Prize in the first round, at the showroom in Paris. It’s already quite a whirl.