The first night, on the floor, at my apartment..
One of the moodboards for the first presentation
From my drawing-lesson :)
Working on my print for the dress
I’VE BEEN THINKING of writing about my collaboration with H&M for a while, the background story. And now, since I feel that I have absolutely nothing else to write about I think the timing is perfect. I will do it in three or four posts. Here is the first one, all the way back to the first day.
I woke up, grabbed my phone the first thing to check my e-mail, as every morning. The only thing I could see, out of all of the e-mails though, was; “Elin Kling for H&M”. I sat up, read it again, yes, it did say “Elin Kling for H&M”. They asked me to meet up with them for lunch, I replied in one second, of course! Tell me when an where and I see you there! My thoughts at this time was that they might let me do a print, or a t-shirt, and that would be freaking awesome. That’s why I got so surprised when they asked me to do my own collection. I actually hugged them all at the first meeting, I was too excited to play it cool, no way.
At the lunch, they asked me if I could tell them what I would love to do, how a fall-collection would look like if I would decide. The worst thing I could imagine happened, I blanked. I seriously did. I didn’t even know one piece that I would love to do, I couldn’t come up with ANYTHING. My world was falling apart, and I asked them to give me one more chance, to hold a presentation the next day. A meeting, at 9 am, was booked for the day after.
I got home, starring at my computer. I didn’t know where to start, not at all. I didn’t know how to do a presentation for a collection? And I couldn’t ask anyone, since it was SUPER SECRET. I did ask Emma, who worked for me at that time to come over though. We sat down at the floor. And went through every magazine, every book I had, and that was pretty many.. I started to take pictures, of everything I liked. A skirt, a color, a piece of furniture… You name it! It ended up around 300 pics, I edited it down to 200, 150, 100 and somewhere around 50 I could see a “red thread”. From that we separate everything to colors, material, pieces and so on. We were done at 4.30 in the morning…
The next day I dressed in H&M, of course. Did the presentation for the amazing design team at H&M. I apologized, and explained that I don’t know at all how this stuff normally works. They just smiled and said that it was better than they expected. I got the project.
From the beginning it was suppose to be a fall collection, but since they liked the design, we changed it in to a spring collection, to have some more time, and to be able to make more pieces. I worked with this team for one year. And we had so much fun! Normally we did early meetings, and I love memories like the breakfast we always had, the smoothies and the sandwiches. Or how we were hiding, all the time, since we didn’t wanted anyone to be suspicious, or the gossip, or all these freaking long meetings, sometimes for six hours. And we were so tired and just laughed.
I wanted to be a part and be involved in EVERYTHING. I even started to take lessons in sketching, that didn’t work out that well though, but I liked it (maybe I should start again…?). If you like this, I will show some behind the scene pics from the shoot next week. Stay tuned…
