VÄV cut jackets in panels to fit half-metre Maya backstrap weaves (interview)

VÄV founder Emma Bogren wanted sustainable fashion with colour and attitude, not the beige basics she says the category defaults to.

Treat the half-metre weave as windows: black-and-white fabric builds the Swedish-house frame, brocade panels open onto Maya artistry.

Working with Cojolya, a Maya weavers’ association on Lake Atitlán, she designed jackets in panels: black-and-white frames with four handwoven brocades this season, detachable sleeves, and scraps remade into passport holders and coin purses.

Collection presented during Green Fashion Week Milan, October 2026 (self-reported in the interview); Bogren says she plans to continue with Cojolya and to bring Guatemalan textiles to the European market.

In an interview with The Fashion Issue during Green Fashion Week Milan, VÄV founder Emma Bogren describes a collection built around Cojolya, a Maya weavers’ association on Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, organised as a Fair Trade association for more than forty years. She recalls falling for the thick backstrap-woven brocades at first sample, then discovering they measure at most half a metre across, against the roughly 1.5-metre widths she was used to.

Her answer, as she tells it, was to design in panels: black and white fabric frames each jacket like the structure of a Swedish house, and the woven sections read as windows onto another culture — what she calls the marriage of both cultures. Four brocades were developed with the weavers this season, their motifs drawn from the world around the lake, one oval-and-dot pattern taken from a flower by the village. Convertible jackets carry detachable sleeves, and she describes cutting an extra toile because the handwoven cloth is treated like a work of art.

Bogren says the collaboration is co-creation — the weavers are the textile artists, and she balances their input against VÄV’s identity. Scraps become passport holders and coin purses; she recalls weavers saying the cloth lasts a lifetime, which shapes her definition of luxury. She also learned that some customers never respond to words like ethical or sustainable — they simply love the jacket.

Conventional pattern-cutting assumed 1.5-metre rolls; the backstrap loom’s half-metre width would have forced cramped, wasteful seams without a rethink.

Bogren wanted sustainable fashion to carry colour and attitude, breaking the subdued-beige stereotype she says plagues the category.

The weavers’ existing brocade language was brought into the garments rather than redrawn, keeping the artisans as authors.

Handwoven cloth’s cost and slowness pushed VÄV to design for full use: extra toiles, detachable parts, remnants remade into products.

A material’s constraint can become the design system: let the loom’s half-metre width dictate the architecture instead of fighting it.

The collection was presented during Green Fashion Week Milan. Bogren says she would love to continue with Cojolya across future collections, valuing its Fair Trade certification as assurance of fair pay, and that the brand must now put more energy into storytelling. Collection details in this entry are self-reported in the interview; no sales or distribution figures were given.