The Chopova Lowena girl is a lover and a rebel. Revelling in teenage turmoil and tenderness. Falling in and out of love with boys who are up to no good. She runs riot in skateparks, picks flowers in the countryside and tears through the world with glorious reckless abandon. Spikes pierce her skirts, devils ride on her shoulder and lucky charms swing around her neck. Realised by masters of contradiction – Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena-Irons – for SS24 the Bulgarian-American and British design duo took their protagonist on a ride through the rebellious side of girlhood with a collection titled GIRL’S TEAR, GIRLS TEAR.

Staged in West London’s BAYSIXTY6 skate park, the brand’s sophomore on-schedule show combined folkloric traditions with the teenage angst of falling in love with the skater boy Avril Lavigne warned you about. Penning their own coming-of-age fable, the Chopova girls continue their foray into the beauty of juxtaposition, proving opposites attract for good reason.

Ella Joyce: I love the title of your SS24 collection, GIRL’S TEAR, GIRLS TEAR, can you tell me where it came from and why it clicked?
Emma Chopova: It’s a spelling thing because it’s pronounced ‘girls tear girls tare’. The collection is about the Helston Flora Day Festival, which is a Cornish folk festival from the town where Laura’s husband grew up, and his dad used to help organise it. There’s a flower which plays a role in it called ‘Lily of the Valley’, which in Bulgarian is called ‘Girl’s Tear’ because it looks like a teardrop. It’s a play on words because the other side of the collection is about skateboarding.

EJ: The casting perfectly reflected those contrasts and casting has become such a distinct part of Chopova Lowena, how do you use it to reflect the brand?
Laura Lowena-Irons: The clothes just look so good on real people. The energy that comes with a person who enjoys wearing the clothes and is just having fun is completely different to a model.
EC: It adds so much because street-cast people, friends, people who aren’t used to being models, or people who have a distinct look – it becomes a personal thing. Sarah Small who does our casting is so good because everyone feels very Chopova Lowena, and then we fit them into a character and they embody that role. Street-casting is so fun because usually it’s their first time walking a show and you get so much energy from them because you’re amping them up before they go out. It’s so nerve-wracking and such a new experience for them. You get a lot of energy and cool individual walks.
LLI: It’s always about looking at the different ways people walk. Some people walk with their hands down and arms straight, or their arms don’t move or only one arm moves. That’s what we like and look out for – someone who has an interesting personality that suits the characters of the collection.

“The clothes just look so good on real people. The energy that comes with a person who enjoys wearing the clothes and is just having fun is completely different to a model.”

EJ: You touched upon Helston Flora Day Festival earlier and I’m fascinated by the folklore narrative you delve into. How did you go about exploring the festival’s roots and symbols through the collection?
EC: We’ve explored quite a few Bulgarian festivals before and it’s such an amazing place to find folklore, rituals and characters. It makes for amazing research. We love culty folkloric things and Helston was a really cool festival to explore. Skateboarding is something we’ve always wanted to do too and this was just the right time to do it, I think it became a lot more about falling in love with a skater boy, that girlhood thing. We wanted to pay homage to that age.
LLI: It was an emotional response to it. It was the visuals for the Helstons but then the emotional angst you remember and dig into from our teen years, especially Emma.

EJ: The good girl falling for a bad boy is a fable I think we all know and love. [all laugh]
EC: We could not agree more. [laughs]

EJ: There were some really cool motifs from the festival and the colour palette felt more monochromatic than we’ve seen before. Was that inclusion of black and white an intentional play on good versus evil?
EC: Yes! It was absolutely intentional, the procession of the festival also goes like that. It starts off at 7am with all these characters, crazy costumes and dances.
LLI: They sing Hal-An-Tow, everyone is dressed as different characters and they do a dance in a circle.
EC: After that, they walk around the whole village, then it’s the children’s parade, then it’s the non-working, rich people’s parade where they put on their Sunday best and that’s where all the floral dresses come from. I think the end of it is the children in white bridesmaid dresses. It’s a festival the same people do [each year], which is funny because when we went we were star-struck – we were like, “Oh my god, that’s that guy!”

EJ: At the show we saw those two worlds meet – we were in a West London skatepark drinking shots of Cornish milk and every seating block had its own character. The attention to detail was crazy.
LLI: Emma is a very particular person. [laughs]
EC: I love details. I love thinking about the way it smells and I love that everyone got a really weird snack to get in the mood.
LLI: As much as you drive me crazy with the details, we love the full experience.
EC: If we’re going to have our own show, it has to be the fullest experience possible. The Gerty Milk was an old Cornish breakfast food – I’m glad you had it because some people skipped it. Even my mum skipped it! She was like, “I’m not having bread with milk, that’s gross.” [laughs]

EJ: Your own mum! [all laugh]
EC: She was the one who basically suggested it too.
LLI: She even gave us the honey.
EC: We were making the milk with Bulgarian honey, it was quite the experience. The characters were funny as well [invites had stickers of this season’s characters relating to seat assignments], we thought it would be cute to have them on the invites and press releases, but I think from a PR point of view everyone was like, “How are [the guests] going to know what character they are?!” [laughs]
LLI: It was a bit of chaos but it worked out. Everyone was like, “What do you mean there isn’t a seat number? How is everyone going to sit down?”

EJ: Everyone was wandering around talking about which character they were, I was a Devil Girl. [all laugh] The soundtrack was really cool too – a mash-up of nineties bands like Limp Bizkit and Drowning Pool. What role does music play in your process?
LLI: Chopi Baby does the music here. [laughs]
EC: We call ourselves Chopi Baby ft. Low Iron because Laura is anaemic and also her name is Lowena-Irons. [all laugh]
LLI: Emma does the music and then at the end I come in and help her arrange it.
EC: The music is a huge part of it and the music I liked when I was fifteen to seventeen is everything my life is about now. It just can’t change. [laughs]
LLI: It suited the skater angst very well this season.
EC: The soundtrack had folkloric soundbites and metal – whatever suits.
LLI: We love a mash-up; the way we design is about collating. There are so many details in the clothing so we wanted to do the same with the music.
EC: There are all kinds of things in there. There’s the sound of an old lady making Cornish pasties in the 80s and some old skating videos.
LLI: There are a lot of YouTube videos in the mix.

EJ: You must spend hours on YouTube! [laughs]
EC: Hours. I play it hundreds of times to Laura and my boyfriend then we listen to it at home really loud a million times. Laura is really good at finding the snippets, sometimes it’s a two-hour video we use three seconds of. It does take a really long time. I do it every summer now – it’s like my summer project.

“Every season we try to make a smaller collection and it just ends up being bigger than the last because we don’t have any self-control.”

EJ: That’s so fun. I also wanted to ask you about accessories because we saw those introduced this season. The bags with the pen pockets were great. You also collaborated with UGG on footwear, how did that come to be?
EC: The bags were a long time coming and they were inspired by the insides of old suitcases and travel cases where you would have compartments to store everything, but we wanted to make a girlhood survival kit. You have your pen and notebook to write down your thoughts, you have your seahorse comb to brush your hair, space for your keys, ID, your nail file. It’s a fun take on what you would need throughout your day. We’re going to keep doing them, the bag will continue to be its own thing and develop, but that’s been exciting and fun for us. It was our first time doing shoes and we’re going to keep [developing footwear], they were something people had asked for a lot and we’re still learning.
LLI: We’re really happy to finally do shoes, they have also been a long time coming – finding the right factory and figuring out something people would want that’s not too crazy. We customised the UGG shoes, which was really fun, we wanted to do a studded shoe anyway so we were really happy that they approached us and they looked really good.
EC: They suited the whole thing really well. We are making our own studded shoes, which are going to be really fun for this coming season.

EJ: Studs, spikes, charms and customisation are such a fundamental part of your brand, do you source all of the charms or do you make each individual one?
EC: We design every single one. We spend so much time doing that.
LLI: We’ve got a whole unit at the moment which is just full of charms and buckles.
EC: We collage them, we draw them in all kinds of ways.
LLI: They’re inspired by the subject of the season and vintage things we find.
EC: We design every single metal thing except things like eyelets, even though we’re trying to design those too. [laughs]

EJ: The brand is building such a recognisable identity – what can we expect to see next season?
EC: The season we’re working on now is about ‘wartime weddings’ – that’s the folkloric theme, it has a lot to do with the 1940s military. The other side is sailing because we moved last August to the river in Deptford and we’re next to a sailing club. That was very inspiring, we love sailing hardware. There is a lot of development from last season but I feel proud of it because I feel like sailing and wartime weddings are very integrated into the clothes.
LLI: There’s a lot of clothes. [all laugh] Every season we try to make a smaller collection and it just ends up being bigger than the last because we don’t have any self-control.

Feature originally published in Heroine 20. 

models LONNEKE TE KLOESE at NEXT PARIS and MENGYU LUO at PREMIUM PARIS’;
hair ANASTASIIA TYMOSHCHUK at SAINT GERMAIN AGENCY;
make-up ANGA BORODINA at SAINT GERMAIN AGENCY using THE UNSEEN BEAUTY, BYREDO and GLOSSIER;
set-design VIOLA VITALI;
casting LYLIA BOKÉLÉ at IKKI CASTING;
lighting assistant ROBIN JEANT;
hair assistant NATALIIA TARASENKO;
make-up assistant MARCO GIACOMO ROSCINO