In the 2025 Stockholm Fashion Week collection by TEMESGEN, a khaki overcoat carried Ethiopic script. It was a coat first: cloth with an outer shape and a use in a wardrobe. The writing belonged to the garment rather than sitting beside it as an explanatory placard. That relationship between something a wearer can live in and something a wearer may want to read is central to the practice of Jimmie Temesgen Sandberg. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden, he founded the Stockholm label with Cordelia Joy O’Brien. Their work brings a personal history into the structure of coats, jackets and trousers without asking every wearer to have the same history.

The overcoat gives the collection a bodily scale. An overcoat has to be cut with enough space for what sits under it. Its weight changes how a person stands; its length changes how the legs look when they move. A mark placed on its surface travels through a city on someone else's body. The wearer may recognize the script, learn to recognize it, or attend first to the coat's proportion and only later to its language. TEMESGEN allows those readings to arrive at different times. Sandberg's experience gives the work its urgency, while the garment leaves room for a life beyond his own.

A life across distances

Sandberg was adopted from Ethiopia as a baby and grew up in Sweden. In a first-person interview with Guzangs, he described learning about his origins and later travelling to Addis Ababa. He recalled seeing patterns and symbols painted on walls while walking with his aunt in Kasanchis. Their forms stayed with him and helped shape his desire to make clothes. A remembered walk through Kasanchis gave the label a visual point of departure. Sandberg carried specific forms he saw with his aunt into clothing made later with O’Brien in Stockholm.

His path into clothing included fashion study in London and work at Die Monde before TEMESGEN. Vogue's report on the Swedish label names Sandberg as its founder and describes his aim to bring Sweden and Ethiopia into a shared design language. The Guzangs interview names O’Brien as cofounder and describes their partnership. Sandberg holds creative direction; O’Brien, according to a 2026 interview with both founders, leads design. A coat from the label belongs to that joint practice, with pattern, textile, graphic decisions and presentation made through a team. The division of work is part of the story rather than a detail to erase.

The label began in 2024 and appeared at Stockholm Fashion Week in 2025. Its name is Sandberg's middle name, an Amharic expression of gratitude. For a designer whose early life crossed a distance he did not choose, naming a label after himself could have made the clothes feel narrowly autobiographical. Instead, his and O’Brien's design brief moves from a personal point of departure toward pieces someone else can wear. The result is a tension useful to fashion: a garment can remember one person's story and still leave space for its next wearer.

The word homecoming became the title of the spring/summer 2026 collection presented in Stockholm. Sandberg spoke in the 2025 Guzangs interview about return as a feeling as well as a place. A collection title could announce that idea without making it visible. TEMESGEN's clothes try to carry it through the ordinary work of dress: a coat that closes around the body, a jacket whose cropped edge changes the length of a torso, trousers that make a larger space for walking. The concept has to survive contact with those shapes.

Reading Homecoming

Reports of Homecoming describe sharply tailored coats, softer draping, cropped jackets and elongated trousers. Black, brown and sand formed much of the palette. Those decisions set up different visual speeds. A tailored coat creates a clear outer boundary; draping lets cloth follow the body less predictably. A cropped jacket ends early and leaves more trouser visible, so an elongated leg can dominate the look. The pieces can be combined in ways that shift the balance between containment and release. That is a more useful description of the clothes than a broad adjective such as minimal.

The label worked with words in Amharic and forms of Ge’ez script, according to the founders' interview. The report describes writing appearing in prints, embroidery, linings, buttons and seams. Each location changes the encounter. A printed word on an outer surface can be seen by strangers. A lining appears when the coat opens or is taken off. A detail at a seam may be noticed only by a wearer or a person close enough to look. Textile design becomes a question of proximity: who can see the mark, under what conditions, and how long does the garment have to be worn before it is found?

The khaki overcoat noticed by Vogue offers a public version of that question. Its script is visible on an outer garment. A coat is often the first part of an outfit seen on a winter street and the last taken off inside. Placing language there gives it a moving site, but it also exposes it to quick glances. The mark can operate as form before it is read as text. Sandberg's own account of painted symbols in Addis Ababa adds another level: writing or patterned forms seen while walking can later become something another person wears while walking elsewhere. The distance between those two experiences is not collapsed by the cloth. It is made present.

The designers also used deadstock and recycled fabrics in the debut collection, according to Vogue. Guzangs identifies Swedish micro-factory Unitex as a production partner and Rekotex as a source of repurposed fabric. Deadstock changes what can be cut: available quantity and color become part of the design brief. A designer has to assemble pieces from cloth that can actually be obtained. Such limits can sharpen decisions about which shapes deserve material. A collection made with recovered cloth must still hold its fit, surface and usefulness through repeated wear.

That test is particularly demanding for the restrained palette of black, brown and sand. When color does not dominate, the proportion of shoulder, hem and trouser leg has to sustain the look. A khaki overcoat will stand among many other coats in a city. Its difference cannot depend solely on its script or founding story; it needs a cut and surface that earn attention on an ordinary day. Across the looks, length meets a cropped edge, structure meets drape, and outer writing meets a mark held close to the body.

The partnership's description of the collection draws on two locations without assigning one kind of form exclusively to either. A sharply tailored coat is not automatically Swedish, and an embroidered script cannot stand for Ethiopia as a whole. Sandberg and O’Brien work with those references as specific choices in a wardrobe. A wearer can put on the coat for its proportion; a reader of the script can encounter another layer of meaning. Neither use cancels the other. The success of the collection depends on those layers remaining legible without requiring the clothing to act as a lesson.

A second Stockholm encounter

TEMESGEN returned to Stockholm Fashion Week in 2026. Vogue Italia's account describes the label as genderless and identifies its second appearance, with oversized jackets, relaxed tailoring and wide-leg trousers. The new presentation was called The First Release. The title can sound paradoxical after an earlier collection. Sandberg and O’Brien framed it in a joint interview as a widening of the label's world: clothing shown within a more developed environment of music, objects and gathering. It was a next chapter in how they presented the work, not a claim that the previous garments never existed.

The silhouettes remained recognizable. Oversized outerwear and wide legs kept space around the body; relaxed tailoring continued to avoid a fixed formal posture. Those repetitions matter to a young label. A second show can chase novelty or ask whether a first collection's ideas have enough range to grow. TEMESGEN chose to develop its vocabulary of large outer shapes and easy lower volumes while changing the context in which they were seen. The garment was still the measure. A generous trouser has to hang convincingly whether it appears against a bare wall or within a carefully composed room.

The 2026 Guzangs interview describes earth-toned cloth and deadstock sourcing. A broad palette shared across two outings gives the work continuity, but the reported changes in scale and setting keep it from becoming a formula. Earth tones can make a coat look quiet at a distance; its volume may make it impossible to ignore up close. Relaxed tailoring likewise joins two directions: the recognized order of a jacket and the bodily ease of additional room. The wearer has to be able to sit, turn and move without the clothes existing only for a runway photograph.

For The First Release, the founders built a presentation around music and objects associated with Ethiopian gathering. Musicians Markus Isberg and Surafel Aseres made the soundscape; the team used a coffee pot, cups and mesob baskets in the space, according to their interview. Those collaborators and objects shaped how visitors encountered the clothing. Yet a runway environment is temporary. The coat is what can leave with a wearer. A garment with a distinctive proportion or a discreetly placed symbol has to hold some of the work's sense of connection once the sound has stopped and the room has been cleared.

The presentation raises a useful question about the label's future. Can the atmosphere that made the show memorable remain available to someone who first sees a jacket in a shop or in a photograph? The answer cannot be supplied only through a written explanation of heritage. It has to emerge in the sleeve, the balance of the body, the material's surface and the care with which a mark is placed. The designers' choice to carry familiar forms from one season to the next suggests that they are building a vocabulary a person can recognize even outside a show. It is a promise each subsequent collection will need to test.

The partnership behind the name

Sandberg has described his Ethiopian birth, Swedish upbringing and return visits to Addis Ababa in his own words. Guzangs identifies O’Brien as head of design, and she describes the shared vision with Sandberg. The khaki coat's script, cut and presentation belong to that coauthored practice. It is an unusual form of eponymous fashion: Sandberg's personal name identifies a label built with another designer, whose design work helps define its material form.

The distinction makes the garments more interesting. A piece can start from a remembered wall in Addis Ababa, pass through research into a script, meet a Swedish fabric supplier, be developed by two designers, and then be cut and sewn by another team. The finished coat contains the decisions of that sequence, even if no single viewer can identify every hand. Knowing the division of labor does not lessen Sandberg's authorship. It gives it a more accurate shape. His vision depends on partnership to become clothing that somebody can actually wear.

In Vogue's 2025 account, the debut was recognized as part of an emerging Swedish fashion scene. Its place in that scene is practical as well as symbolic. Showing at Stockholm Fashion Week put TEMESGEN among designers asking what contemporary dress in Sweden can look like. Sandberg's biography is one answer to who participates in that conversation; the khaki coat's proportion, cloth and script are an answer to what such participation can produce. The clothes cannot be reduced to a proof of representation. Their construction and use are the reason to keep looking.

O’Brien and Sandberg spoke in 2026 about extending the collection into a fuller experience. A presentation can encourage viewers to slow down, see how a garment moves, and notice details that a single image misses. It can also risk making clothing seem dependent on a staged meaning. TEMESGEN's most persuasive answer is the continuing wardrobe itself: coats, jackets and trousers whose shapes can travel beyond the event. The show gives the pieces a setting; the wearer gives them another.

The khaki overcoat remains the clearest image of that exchange. The script is public, but a person wearing the coat may feel its weight and width more constantly than the words on its surface. In Homecoming, other marks were placed where a wearer might discover them privately. In The First Release, the surrounding room widened the conversation. Across both, the label works with differences of distance: between Ethiopia and Sweden, between a visible mark and a hidden one, between an event and an ordinary day. Sandberg's story starts the work; Sandberg and O’Brien's garments ask how far it can move.