LONDON - London Fashion Week celebrates FYODOR GOLAN leading the charge to embrace technology into the fashion industry’s creative process.
In 2011 the Latvian fashion designer Fyodor Podgorny, and his partner Golan Frydman, launched the London-based multi award-winning creative label FYODOR GOLAN onto the fashion scene.
The Baltic Times was extended an invitation during September to attend the London Fashion Week to view the couple’s new daring, futuristic computer- and projection-based spring/summer 2017 show. And there over five days 83 designer shows were staged, generating an estimated 100 million British pounds of orders from the international audience of press and buyers from 58 countries, including the Baltic States.
In February this year, the duo further debuted their autumn collection during London Fashion Week, which saw a collaboration with Coca-Cola that brought them worldwide attention, and witnessed striking designs and images featuring vintage “bathing beauties” adverts and the iconic glass Coca-Cola bottle, which had been reinterpreted in a contemporary and culturally relevant way.
Podgorny has stated that London offers him a very international platform, with people from all over the world coming to London Fashion Week, which transforms the city into a creative, vibrant hub. The UK fashion industry still hopes that this status will be maintained, as London wallows in confusion over the prospect of Brexit, which was deeply unpopular in the UK fashion industry, an industry which in 2015 contributed 28 billion pounds to the United Kingdom’s economy and employed 900,000 individuals. The British Fashion Council, the organisers of London Fashion Week, undertook a survey in June, in the run up to the referendum, of 290 UK-based designer fashion businesses. The survey identified that 90 per cent of the fashion industry wished to remain in the EU.
Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, said 70 per cent of the British fashion industry’s 8.5-billion-pound exports go to Europe. “Continuing to have access to the single market is going to be vitally important to us,” she said.
Though the fashion industry is fiercely competitive and unpredictable in every imaginable way, this does not prevent talented young European designers, including Latvians, from establishing themselves on the London fashion scene.
Latvian fashion designer Linards Augusts, who designs tailor made men’s and women’s clothing for celebrities, business leaders, and diplomats, will relocate his business to London, to build on his professional co-operation with artisan and couture accessories designer, Edward Griffiths.
“Griffiths has not only created custom sculptural pieces and accessories for fashion clients including Fendi, Emanuel Ungaro haute couture, and consults for brands such as Ecco,” said Augusts.
Griffiths has also worked on a variety of films for studios including Warner Brothers, Disney, and Pixar and films such as Clash of the Titans, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
“So I’m delighted to be co-operating with such a noted designer. It shows that fashion professionals do believe in the potential of Latvian fashion designers to build world class labels,” said August.
Theresa May, the UK prime minister, at a reception at No 10 to launch London Fashion Week stated that “the government will do everything we can, including providing the right investment in training and skills to help everyone, whatever people’s backgrounds, to go as far as their talents can take them.”
Podgorny came back to London in 2007 after studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The UK has provided fertile soil for this Latvian, and his partner. Within a relatively short business time span of five years, these two dynamic creative designers, and married couple, have established an internationally recognisable brand image, which they achieved through exuberant collections, and coupled with an untiring drive and expressive, creative approach.
Podgorny’s and Frydman’s label has become renowned through the celebrity support they have received through collaborations with iconic global chart-topping artists as Lady Gaga and Gwen Stefani, who have both incidentally turned their hand to fashion designing; Rihanna, one of the best-selling artists of all time, as well as one of the world’s favourite and most successful supermodels, and style icon Claudia Schiffer, and French fashion designer, Roland Mouret.
The two have balanced their creative sensibilities while being business partners and a married couple well.
“There’s always a conflict but we love those differences between us. We love to explore opposites rather than similarities, it’s just something a part of our brand, we’re like Jekyll and Hyde,” Podgorny’s partner has stated.
Podgorny and Frydman have developed a reputation for being at the forefront of combining fashion and technology. They consider themselves experimenters with spirit, pushing and exploring the interaction of tech gadgets with fashion. They launched a smartphone skirt in collaboration with Nokia Lumia, and with Microsoft developed a powered runway show, which reinvented the catwalk show at London Fashion Week.
FYODOR GOLAN collections encompass a wardrobe for today’s global modern and iconic women. A seductive, fragile, and fearless woman.
“Our woman is expressive, sexual, and sensitive. She wants to love and be loved, but she is not afraid to show her energy and strive. She is an international woman,” Podgorny has stated.
It is without doubt that Podgorny and Frydman possess a formidable business-oriented mindset. “We try to find the fine line between creativity and business,” Podgorny has stated.
“Our final goal is to establish a fashion house, a FYODOR GOLAN maison, so in five years we’ll hopefully be halfway there.”
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