Sophia Lech

Excerpts from an Interview with the Designer

Recorded on: Feb 22 2023

Tell me about your collection!

My big inspiration is very ethereal and flowy types of garments, but it's also playing with androgyny.

There's no gender in my clothes, and I have male models wearing dresses, female models wearing pants, even though women wear pants all the time. Very androgynous, but leaning more on the feminine side so men can access like that feminine side of clothing and not having, having to be so masculine in what they wear.

And then as for my theme, I wanted to do something very creepy. It's all about obsession and that love loss and how love can make you go crazy in the things you love in your life. And how you just chase these goals, but sometimes you just don't get them. And how it can be hard to let that go of.

So, it's just kind of someone unhinged, and just losing their cool on whatever's going on in their life. 

What elements are you bringing into your designs to highlight that unhinged-ness?

My designs have very historical influences. Because I feel like that also plays into that romantic love aspect of what I'm trying to do while it's also trying to stay creepy. These weird silhouettes that are flowy yet chaotic, but there are aspects to each piece that are calm and just simple, but then other parts are just so chaotic. And I feel like that is part of my concept.

What inspired this theme of creepiness and obsession?

I love macabre. I love dark themes. I write a lot of poetry, and my poetry is very dark. I also write a little bit more just like short stories, and those usually have dark themes. While going through Pinterest to find my theme, at first it started out with pirates and Southern Gothic, but then it shifted into something more romantic. I get my inspiration from images and Pinterest, I just scroll in there for hours. I saw it shift into something that has a love aspect to it and betrayal and just going crazy, and I just really like that concept. 

What’s love-loss? 

It can be interpreted in different ways, literally losing someone you love or someone dying. But then you have to move on from things and you have to be willing to get over it because you can't keep putting yourself in these dark cycles of love-loss, even though it usually happens for the good. You have to be okay with moving on and losing that love that you had. And my collection is based on the dark side of that, and not moving on, and being stuck in that cycle.

How does androgyny play with the dark themes in your collection?

Yeah, so all emotions, they're non-gender. Everyone feels emotion, everyone knows loss, everyone knows love. And life is gonna hit you no matter who you are and what your background is, and what gender you are.

So I feel like all these juxtaposing ideas of gender and fashion, and love and loss. I feel like they're all similar in one way or another, so that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to tie all these juxtaposing themes together and say that anyone can experience all these things that people might think hit others more.