A skirt embroidered with reversible sequins offers its wearer a small power: run a hand across it and the surface changes. At FEBEN's spring 2025 show, that movement belonged to a collection called Reign. A different look placed a net of beads over the body, at once protective in outline and open in fact. These are not interchangeable gestures of spectacle. One invites the wearer to alter the image; the other makes the space between ornament and skin visible. Both begin with a question that runs through FEBEN's work: what can a garment ask its wearer to do after the designer has finished making it? [1]
FEBEN is the professional name of a designer with Ethiopian roots who grew up in Sweden and established her label in London after a master's degree at Central Saint Martins. Her own biography describes work in London and Milan, including the 2024 show supported by Dolce & Gabbana, the independent Reign show in September 2024, and Staunch, presented through photography and a London gathering the following season. [2] Those milestones describe where the work was seen. The more revealing continuity lies in what the clothes do: a manipulated fabric creates its own topography, a cut changes how a body is outlined, and a surface can respond to touch rather than remain fixed for a photograph.
Texture has been a persistent tool, not simply a house signature to be repeated for recognition. At the Milan autumn/winter 2024 presentation, FEBEN told Vogue that her interest in texture developed partly from having few resources to buy the clothes she wanted when she was younger. The point is not a neat origin myth in which scarcity automatically produces ingenuity. It is her own explanation for learning to make material alteration do visible work. A dress can acquire depth from its handling, even when it begins with a relatively familiar silhouette. That is a practical, teachable proposition about design, distinct from the celebrity list that often accompanies accounts of her career. [3]
The Twist pieces make the proposition tangible. Vogue recorded that the 2024 Milan collection brought the established puckered form into velvet, after earlier versions in satin. AnOther later described the technique as shirring with elastic thread. [3][4] Shirring is not merely a texture laid on top of a finished garment. It can shorten, gather and expand fabric, changing the relation between flat cloth and the body beneath it. Velvet brings a different weight and response to light from satin; the same structural idea does not make the two dresses equivalent. On the body, a gathered surface may compress at one point and open at another. The documented technique explains that movement even though the exact pattern pieces remain private.
FEBEN's current shop still groups a Twist range alongside fringed garments and dresses. It lists a Twist mini dress, velvet vest top, cropped velvet trouser, and other variations. [5] A shop listing does not prove that every size fits every person or that every item is continually in stock. It does demonstrate that the fabric treatment is being asked to work across categories, not just in one archival runway image. A mini dress puts the gathered surface around the torso and hips; a trouser has to respond to sitting and walking; a vest top places it close to the shoulder and upper body. Each application requires the maker to decide where stretch and compression are useful and where they might become a constraint.
A print made, rather than borrowed
The 2024 Milan collection also showed how FEBEN approaches a print. Vogue reported that she took tiger motifs from Dolce & Gabbana's 1990s archive, rebuilt them as collages of duct tape and coloured paper, and translated those collages into fabric for close-fitting dresses. [3] The borrowing matters because it occurred within a programme supported by the Italian house, and the result should not be described as a tiger image invented from nothing. Yet a collage has a different edge from a polished digital reproduction. Tape, paper, cutting and recombination place a handmade interruption between source and garment. The resulting print sits on a stretch tube dress, where the body's curves and movement change how the image can be read.
This is one of the useful tensions in FEBEN's design. She makes objects that can appear immediately legible from a runway seat: a vividly printed dress, a velvet Twist piece, a beaded form. Looking longer shows several different routes to that impact. The tiger dress takes an archival image through an improvised physical process. Twist develops a surface by changing the cloth itself. Beadwork adds separate objects and labour to a garment. To call them all “bold” would erase the choices that make them different. Their visual energy is the result of varied techniques rather than one all-purpose mood.
The Milan show included chaps made in Accra with artisans using upcycled plastic beads, as Vogue reported. [3] The city, material and garment give the collaboration a specific shape. The public account does not name every maker or describe the terms under which discarded plastic became beads. What it does show is a surface built from many individual elements. On a garment shaped as chaps, that surface has to move with the leg and retain its structure as the body walks. The beadwork gives the piece more than colour: it alters weight, texture and the way light catches a moving form. Those are design consequences visible in the object without assigning undocumented claims to the partnership.
The collection's casting was also part of its design proposition. Vogue described curve models in FEBEN's Milan show and reported her commitment to dressing more than one sample-size body. [3] That commitment is not satisfied by a single photograph. If a ruched dress, tailored shoulder or narrow printed tube is to work across bodies, the design must be tested through fitting and grading. The show placed those garments on different bodies, making fit visible rather than treating one runway figure as the garment's only possible inhabitant. Cloth that is gathered to expand must still hold its shape and allow the person inside it to move.
Reign: movement as a material
With Reign, FEBEN made weather and agency meet in the title. In Vogue's account, she played on a rainy British summer and the possibility of changing one's response to difficult conditions. The dancer Antonia Singla, whose work drew strength from her experience of deafness, was a reference she discussed backstage. [1] That is a specific designer statement, not a reason to treat every garment as a literal portrait of the performer. What travels from the reference into the clothes is an attention to movement. A cotton dress with a lowered waist and flounced hem behaves differently when the wearer turns; a fronded jersey piece can be almost dormant on a hanger and animated in use.
The show contained both familiar and newly tested materials. Vogue identified white cotton dresses with blotched surfaces, velvet Twist pieces, and cinched shirts made in collaboration with the Swedish textile developer OnceMore, which works with regenerated wood pulp. [1] Each material takes a different role. Cotton can hold a dropped waist and a mobile hem; velvet makes a gathered surface absorb and return light; a regenerated-cellulose textile enters the tailoring of a shirt. The collaboration connects FEBEN's London work with a Swedish materials company, while the shirts themselves still have to succeed through fit and cut. Fibre provenance and the shape of a garment are distinct parts of its making.
The Accra beadwork returned in a netted column dress with a bateau neckline and ostrich-feather trim. FEBEN described a tension between protection and exposure in that object. [1] The net is decisive because it has gaps. If the purpose were simply to cover, a continuous cloth would do the job differently. Beads can give a garment weight, sound and rhythm while leaving skin visible between them. A feather trim changes the edge of the form, making it less rigid than a solid armour plate. Protection and exposure remain present together as the wearer moves; neither quality has to cancel the other.
Other Reign pieces turned alteration into a direct action. Split-seamed skirts and vest dresses with sculpted hips carried reversible sequins that could change direction under a hand. [1] A sequin changes colour or sheen when flipped, but the more consequential design decision is to make the change available to a wearer. A runway look is often fixed by a stylist for one passage down the catwalk. Here, the surface suggests more than one state after the show. The garment remains authored by FEBEN, yet its exact appearance can be unsettled by someone else. That small transfer of control is why the detail is more than decoration.
The sculpted hips deserve equal attention. A hip shape changes the body's outline at a point where fashion has long made restrictive demands. In Reign, a constructed enlargement and a touch-responsive surface coexist. The design does not promise liberation in an abstract sense; a wearer will still judge comfort, movement and the fit of the actual piece. It does open another visual possibility. The silhouette need not merely trace the body, and the embellishment need not remain as it was when it left the workroom. FEBEN is asking the garment to have a life in the wearer's hands.
Staunch: changing the terms of glamour
The next documented collection, Staunch, changed the presentation as well as the clothes. Rather than stage a conventional runway for autumn/winter 2025, FEBEN showed editors the garments at close range in a London office. AnOther reported trousers that could be worn low or high and hand-painted tops with interchangeable straps and adaptable sleeves. [4] These are precise changes in use. A trouser's rise affects proportion, posture and what it can be paired with. A strap can alter support or exposure; a sleeve can change the balance of an outfit. The garments propose several arrangements without asking the customer to buy a completely new piece for each effect.
FEBEN connected the collection to Grey Gardens, the 1975 documentary about Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale. She was drawn to Little Edie's determined, improvised self-presentation, as she explained to both Vogue and AnOther. [4][6] The reference is useful where it becomes construction, rather than simply a story pasted onto a moodboard. Vogue described a tea dress with an off-centre fall of crystal-strewn faux fur, a larger keyhole dress, tailoring in marigold satin and garments with knotted openings. [6] Their forms look as though glamour is being held together, shifted or exaggerated. The clothing translates a way of arranging oneself into drape, fastening and volume.
AnOther's account of a long faux-fur coat gives that translation particular weight. It described graduated tiers reaching the floor, while FEBEN explained that she gathered and enlarged portions of the material and built a corseted wool waist. [4] A sweeping coat can easily become a single theatrical image. Here the junction between the expansive outer surface and a controlled centre does much of the work. The waist gives the eye a place to understand the scale above and below it. Faux fur carries bulk and movement; wool supplies another structural register. The shape depends on that opposition: a disciplined middle holds the eye while the tiers extend towards the floor.
Staunch also returned to a play with illusion. Vogue noted a yellow checked dress with the image of a damask slip gown running down its front, recalling an earlier graduate piece that used a printed body image. [6] A print can describe a second garment without adding its actual fabric. The eye sees a layer that the hand may not find. The device joins FEBEN's interests in surface and body but works differently from the tactile Twist treatment: one modifies what the cloth does, the other what an image makes us expect. Putting them in the same archive suggests a designer who is interested in the gap between appearance and physical reality, not simply in maximal decoration.
The body in the business
FEBEN told AnOther that designing for different body types matters to her, while also describing how much responsibility the industry places on small labels with limited resources. [4] A commitment to fit has design consequences: grading, sampling and casting all cost money. A Twist dress or adjustable trouser must be developed for the bodies it is meant to serve, not merely declared inclusive in a collection statement. The ambition has to meet the capacity of a small studio, garment by garment and fitting by fitting. Its force lies in the continued work of making those pieces better.
The format of Staunch brought practical questions into the room. At a showroom presentation, visitors could inspect the painted top's strap, feel the weight of a coat and see how a trouser adjusts. A runway image moves too quickly to reveal every part of an object. Close presentation also exposes weaknesses if an ambitious piece does not hold up at arm's length. FEBEN's choice of format during a costly season shaped both the expense of showing and the attention the clothes could receive. It placed construction in front of the press, where it could be examined rather than merely applauded.
FEBEN grew up in Sweden, where her mother, who had left Ethiopia, used clothes as a form of expression while learning a new language. FEBEN recalled being drawn to fashion partly through a desire to fit in when the things her friends wore were beyond reach. [4] Those memories help explain why clothing can be both social code and material experiment in her practice. They do not reduce a velvet dress to autobiography. The dress still has to be cut, gathered, fitted and sold in the present.
London, Sweden, Milan and Accra each enter FEBEN's work in a different way. Sweden was where she grew up and where one Reign textile collaborator works. London is the label's base and the site of the independent Reign presentation. Milan offered a platform and an archival image that she remade in collage. Accra is where artisans produced beadwork for the chaps. These are relationships of life, material development, institutional support and making, rather than interchangeable sources of visual inspiration. Each relationship brings specific people and processes into the making of the clothes.
FEBEN's clothes invite attention from across a room, but their lasting interest survives closer inspection. The Twist dress changes the cloth itself; the tiger dress changes an archival motif through paper and tape; the Reign sequins permit a hand to revise the surface; the Staunch top lets its wearer rearrange straps and sleeves. In each case, form is made but not sealed. The designer has built a vocabulary of garments that can keep changing through movement, touch and styling. That is a stronger explanation of their energy than any generic claim that they are fearless. Their force lies in the work required to make change possible.
Sources and reporting
[1] Vogue, Reign spring 2025 runway report. [2] FEBEN's official biography. [3] Vogue, Milan autumn/winter 2024 review. [4] AnOther, 2025 collection interview published 2026. [5] FEBEN's current shop. [6] Vogue, Staunch autumn/winter 2025 review.