Fashion needs to be so inclusive that even if you have somehow hurt yourself, you can still be part of it all

This is not just getting your cool friends to draw on the cast that you need over your lower right arm after you fell from skateboarding and broke your wrist. Nor, on a smaller scale, is this the Hello Kitty plaster you used on a cut after you nicked yourself while shredding cucumber for the bimbimbap lunch. Heck, this is not even Jean-Charles the Castelbajac using hospital bandage (a luxury version!) for his BandAid dress of the ’90s. This is making actual ligature a part of the look. And that is what Finnish designer Rolf Ekroth, who—as his corporate profile tells us,—“champions utilitarianism”, has done. Strictly speaking, that should be synonymous with functionality. And what is more functional than gauze bandage used to secure a dressing applied to a wound?

Apart from the bandaged lower arm that appeared in one of his looks (T-shirt with contrast sleeves and illustration on the chest, and paper-bag jeans), there is also the sling (worn with a millitary-ish boiler-suit): Yes, a hanging bandage usually placed around the neck—as it is in this case—in which an injured arm or hand is supported or rendered immobile. Only now, Mr Ekroth has made his sling in a fabric with floral prints that could have been abstracted from Marimekko. As we do not know for sure if the models were indeed hurt, it would be unnecessarily barbed to consider the swath and support mockery.

Mr Ekroth, a psychology and social work major who once played poker professionally before embarking on fashion, is big on the tactile. He has caught the attention of fashion folks outside Finland with immensely intriguing surface treatments of the three-year-old label’s mainly gender-neutral collections. Hand fraying of fabrics seems to be a signature technique. Perhaps, the bandaging by hand as well. In a world that has so much going on that could be injurious to the craft of fashion, the binding up could be a confident sign of healing too.

Photos: Rolf Ekroth