To highlight the clothes currently inhabiting our fantasy wardrobe, we've teamed up with vitaminwater and asked The FADER's extended family of photographers, stylists and models to pool their talents and showcase some of the best threads around. Each Styled by FADER will feature a different brand's collection of the season that sits at the top of our most-wanted list. This week, we bring you R/H. Click through the slideshow to see more photos from the shoot and to read our thoughts about the brand.
R/H is a young people's brand. Designers Hanna Riiheläinen and Emilia Hernesniemi became friends while taking courses at the University of Art & Design in Helsinki. Initiated via a casual text message between the two, R/H is their first line. Riiheläinen and Hernesniemi are up on, but not caught up in, the subcultures and varied underground scenes in their native Helsinki. They draw references from the photography of Irving Penn and Stieg Larsson's heroine Lisbeth Salander. R/H is a decidedly modern mishmash of their world. We spoke with Emilia about all that goes into the making of R/H and where the first year has taken them.
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For this fall collection, the graphics are heavily layered. Even though the palette is mainly gray, black and silver, there’s a lot of intensity in the prints. I’m the one who makes the prints. I paint fairly often. After like two weeks of painting, I'll decide what to use in the prints and then I just cut and glue it all back together. We usually we get the colors for each collection from the prints I make.
Do the two of you ever butt heads over your designs? Yeah we do, but I think we’re doing it less and less. We’ve noticed if one of us has an idea for a piece of clothing, even if the other one doesn’t understand the idea, it usually ends up being a hit. For example, the Mickey dress that we have, that was Hannah’s idea and I was like, I think that’s been made so many times, even though I couldn’t prove it, and I said that I'd never wear it. And right now I’m sitting here wearing the Mickey dress. Its become the most popular dress in the whole collection, and everybody’s asking for it, in press and sales, it has been really good.
The fabrics from the line have strong tactile qualities. What are the materials that you used? All the leather that we use comes from Lapland in Finland, so it's organic reindeer leather. It's always bad to say that to foreign people, but not to Finnish people. These are animals that have had a good life and lived in the forest. Otherwise we use a lot of bamboo jersey. It's really soft and it breathes, so it's cool on your skin. Also it's antibacterial, so if you don’t want to wash your clothes you can get away with it. Well, you should still wash them. We have a lot of solid and printed silk. Most of our prints are usually on silk or really thin cotton. Even though silk costs so much money now a days, it just brings so much more to the print as well.
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Do you find that nightlife and the party scene in Helsinki influence R/H? In the whole of Finland people are really laid back and they dress really relaxed and kind of mellow, but I think Helsinki has a really different atmosphere. I think people put a lot of effort into dressing up. They're going out, buying fashion and wearing it and showing it off and supporting the Scandinavian brands. It's definitely a part of people wanting to show that they know about things. There’s a really crazy club scene also, really strong gay culture in Helsinki so that I’m sure if you would come here you would see that as well. If you go to Stockholm, everyone’s really nicely dressed up, but not too much of anything. It's really casual and also really simple. In Helsinki you can see a lot more details and crazy stuff as well— all of this kind of goes into the line.
So what’s the reception been like? The reception has been just so overwhelmingly good. We’re just so happy about it because we’ve only been around for a year. This was our third collection, and it's only the beginning. It has been amazing to see so many people interested in R/H In Scandinavia, it’s not typical for a Finnish label to be getting this much attention. It's usually the Swedish or the Danish ones that get all the press and everything. And I'll give it to them, because their designs are beautiful and they have so many good labels, and we don’t have that many. We're being carried in great retailers like Wood Wood in Berlin and we're now in Henrik Vibskov’s shop in Copenhagen as well. But also just press and bloggers from everywhere writing about us. Just seeing people at the festivals this summer for example, we saw so many ordinary girls wearing our dresses, which is the most important thing. Regular girls, like us, buying the label, it's not just like an art piece that you go and look at at a shop, you also want to wear it.
Do you feel like you’re putting Finnish fashion on the map? Well, we hope so. There aren’t that many labels coming from Finland everyday so that’s why it's an easy task. If you do fashion and you’re from Finland someone will mention it. The Swedish press are usually really interested or maybe even suspicious about fashion if it's from Finland. There are so many really talented people from Helsinki and Finland doing really creative stuff. We Finns have a really good background in design and also like prints and colors and that kind of stuff that has been going around since the ’40s and ’50s and that’s why it would be nice to be part of the new generation of Finnish fashion.
Photography John Francis Peters. Styling Deidre Dyer. Model Javana Mundy. All clothes by R/H. All shoes by Minimarket.