Top image: courtesy of Marco Van Rijt

Ellen Pedersen is an unknown worth knowing. Having only been on the scene for around a year, the RCA graduate – a mentee of Astrid Andersen – is already looking strong to join the school’s acclaimed list of alumni and alumnae.

2015’s Copenhagen Fashion Week was her debut, where she collaborated with light-artist Jakob Kvist for her SS16 collection; her FW16 compendium was a sharp incision into orthodox takes on subcultures and male sportswear: piercing, compelling, distinct.

Over the years menswear has weathered a surge in visionary recasts of male identity. Suiting is sidelined and formal tropes are being adapted. Packing these voids are visual melodies of sportswear-infused get-ups, informal lines and energised abstracts of a new male form. Pederesen is part of this signification, uncompromising, she drives a direction more apt for today’s man and in line with the menswear industry’s fresh creative discourse.

Lewis Firth: Attending such a prestigious university (Royal College of Art) to study menswear design is impressive; how did that experience help refine and direct your craft?
Ellen Pedersen: The Royal College of Art is an amazing place filled with skilled tutors and a world of possibilities. I got pushed like hell there, but in the end I learned to relax and enjoy what I do – which is so important for creativity! I miss RCA a lot.

LF: Sportswear and subcultures are core to your brand’s narrative – can you explain your interest in those areas?
EP: Subculture is a kind of obsession for me, I admire how the boys can group up, especially the Mods, who were cool with their beautiful clothes but also had this collective appearance and behaviour. I love to look back at these groups and I think if I was a boy in 60s London I would have been a Mod, fascinated by my own clothes and Vespa scooter.

There is also something fascinating and a bit scary about groups, like the Skinheads or Casuals, which really compels me.

LF: You’ve trained with Christopher Raeburn and Astrid Andersen; was there anything particularly profound that they taught you?
EP: Persistence! Astrid is a great mentor and role-model for me, I was there when she started and I therefore learned a lot about how to build up a brand with her.

LF: What’s so vital and core to London’s fashion scene is innovation; you appreciate that – which is apparent in your designs. What do you find compelling about creative pattern-cutting?
EP: I enjoy pattern cutting and I am good at it. For FW16 I found inspiration in a Khayamiya-Cairo tentmaking exhibition. I admire craftsmanship and the skills these men had to create these beautiful tents: following the lines; hand-stitching and their patience needed to create them. The symmetry and discipline was a great inspiration to me and something I desired to focus on. I transformed this discipline in terms of pattern-cutting for FW16, being more symmetric and diagonal in the lines than I had previously explored.

LF: For SS16 you collaborated with light-artist, Jakob Kvist, and was inspired by Casuals as well as the Bloomsbury Group. What attracted you to such source material?
EP: I was reading a book about Bloomsbury Group at that time and I conducted a bit more research into their clothes and art, which inspired me in terms of fabric manipulation.

I always start with wanting to create something beautiful, with a bite of classicism, but then the pattern-cutting techniques take over and it becomes something very different.

The colour story and styling came from the Casuals, who are a group I also love – maybe being an 80s child myself, their clothes are not that foreign to me. I have a fascination with light and wanted to work with a light-artist who could embrace the pattern-cutting, which Jakob did really well.