In the beginning there is uncertainty, then comes a new beginning, fear, confusion, sadness, and finally resignation at having been on the road for so long. All of these fugitive emotions inspired Rosa Dahl’s collection, which she presented at the promising debut of her streetwear label SF1OG during Berlin Fashion Week.
The show begins with a model scantily clad in an oversized white shirt. The next wears a worn white jacket, followed by a model in a black sweater interspersed with light red leather fringes. The somber atmosphere is amplified by the tense music, interspersed with sirens.
The issue of flight is red hot in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but Dahl had the idea for her PP1P collection for a long time. “The collection is about flight and war, that was the topic from the start because that’s the story of my grandmother,” said Dahl on Thursday in Berlin after her show in a former factory building in Berlin’s Neukölln district.
family and escape
Her grandmother fled her village, which is in present-day Poland, during World War II. “A lot of people thought they were coming back, but they aren’t,” she says of the story of the Germans fleeing the Red Army.
For her collection, she analyzed photos of her grandmother and watched documentaries. “I’m always very fond of lines, I traced the lines that I saw there and partly silhouettes and patterns and worked them into the pattern,” she says.
Recycled materials also play a big role, because they already have a story – “that’s a story to tell, figuratively,” explains the designer. A short jacket was made from 150-year-old wheat sacks, and she sewed old fur coats from her grandmother into a long patchwork coat.
After walking to Berlin and staying in homes, Rosa Dahl’s grandmother ended up in a small German town, where she went to school. But she felt alien and couldn’t go home. “Sadness, joy, resignation, you don’t know how you should feel,” Dahl describes the emotions of refugees after their arrival, which she would like to share with the viewers in the last part of her show.
Next Steps
Dahl has worked with various concepts in the past when designing individual outfits for artists. Then came the thought of taking the next step. With a collection, she wanted to “show a complete picture, a complete vision.”
She founded her label SF1OG in 2019 while studying at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Initially, the orders provided financial security for a short period of time. Since she graduated in 2021, she has been fully focused on her own label.
Jakob Langemeyer also joined last year, the two of them knew each other from their school days in Lüneburg. Since then he has been taking care of the economic side and marketing.
In the meantime, the two have also started small “series productions”. These long sleeves or waistcoats cost between 120 and 390 euros in their own online shop and are cheaper than the individual pieces, which are mostly made of upcycled materials and sometimes cost 700 euros or more.
“We want to give such materials a use. You can’t make such products as series products, they are one-offs,” explained Langemeyer.
Rosa Dahl’s collection is still sewn in Berlin, but in the future the two would like to expand production and also sell a complete collection. There are still no points of sale outside of its own online shop, but the label is already in talks with the first fashion retail companies.
If retailers are interested, for example, parts from the current collection could be produced, says Dahl. But she wants to go “with the flow” overall. “We are a team of two people, so you can react very well. We are very flexible.”