The sleeve of Karo Kurrani's Kotto blazer does something its name does not prepare you for. From the body of a tailored jacket comes the volume of a bomber, made in patterned Persian Termeh. The rest of the piece uses coated Italian cotton. Two garment types meet at the shoulder, but neither disappears. The blazer keeps its upright, composed line; the sleeve brings a softer, more mobile shape and a very different surface. It is a useful introduction to a designer who is interested in what a textile remembers, and in what happens when it is given a job for which it was not traditionally chosen.
Kurrani is an Iranian designer based in Copenhagen. Mads Nørgaard Copenhagen's account of his 2023 residency identifies both his background and the label he established in 2022. His own studio describes garments made by hand in Copenhagen, bringing classical elements into contact with a more futuristic sense of form. Those are broad ambitions. The Kotto blazer gives them a seam: a familiar tailored body interrupted by a bomber sleeve made from Termeh, a textile with a long Iranian history. The design asks how much a jacket can change while still feeling like a jacket.
In a 2023 interview with The Copenhagen Post, Kurrani described a family history in carpet making and his own early experience of working with fabric. That history enters a practice also shaped by design education in Denmark and the practical requirements of coats and bags. His fabrics carry memories, but their cut and construction give those memories a life in the present.
A blazer with another life at its shoulders
The Kotto listing identifies the main cloth as coated cotton with a small elastane component and the sleeves as silk-viscose Termeh. A cotton lining completes the listed construction. The information matters because the contrast is more than visual. Coated cotton can hold a crisp outer shape; a patterned sleeve brings a different fall and sheen. The jacket does not simply print a Persian motif onto a familiar Western silhouette. It places the textile in a part of the garment that moves constantly, bends at the elbow and changes its profile as its wearer lifts an arm.
The sleeve also borrows from another form of outerwear. A bomber's fullness can accommodate movement and produce a rounded outline, where conventional blazer sleeves would usually continue the jacket's sharper lines. Kurrani uses that difference as structure. The shoulder becomes a point of negotiation between two garments rather than a place where one decorative tradition is attached to another. Looking at the coat as tailoring first makes the intervention clearer: the body provides a frame, and the sleeves refuse to behave as merely matching parts.
The studio lists the blazer as made in Denmark and describes making garments by hand in Copenhagen. The relationship between place and process is concrete here. Copenhagen is where the label says this work is assembled; Iran enters through a named textile and a specific pattern tradition. Neither location is made to stand for a whole aesthetic.
The blazer brings Kurrani's wider practice into focus through the meeting of two materials. The large sleeve has to sit beside a controlled jacket body. Its patterned silk-viscose surface functions as part of the outer garment rather than as a souvenir of another use. Kurrani's solution keeps the contrast legible and turns it into the character of the piece.
The seventh wave
Kurrani's 2023 capsule 7th Wave put another kind of movement at the center. He presented it in Copenhagen on 8 March that year, alongside work by the Iranian artist Farshad Farzankia at Andersen's gallery, according to the first-person interview in The Copenhagen Post and Mads Nørgaard's account. The collection responded to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. Its title drew on Kurrani's account of successive movements for freedom and on the idea of a seventh wave gathering force. He supplied both meanings in his account of the capsule.
The clothes carried that political setting through cut and material. The reporter who visited Kurrani's Copenhagen showroom described slouching bomber jackets, loose trousers and soft clutch bags. Green, purple and blue patterned fabrics ran through the collection. In a mauve bomber, Kurrani showed the reporter a blue lining and the folds of an extended sleeve. The outward shape was relaxed rather than ceremonial. It gave a textile more often reserved for interiors or details the room to move across an entire outer garment.
Kurrani identified the fabric as Termeh and the curved paisley-like motif as Boteh Jehgeh. In the interview he said that he chose a silk-viscose version rather than the costly pure-silk textile. The decision belongs to both design and production. It allowed him to use a large quantity of patterned material on a jacket, not just to trim an edge. At that scale, the cloth could establish the bomber's presence. The wearer could turn, zip and move in it; the motif became part of the jacket's ordinary life rather than a precious fragment displayed behind glass.
The interview also records an embroidered image of Jina Mahsa Amini on one jumper. Her death after detention by Iran's morality police in 2022 sparked the movement to which the capsule paid tribute. The portrait makes one statement directly. Elsewhere, Kurrani lets volume, pattern and the title carry the argument more openly, leaving the garments to function as garments.
He explained the elongated, gathered sleeves as part of the wave imagery and as a reference to the labor of activism. A long sleeve can be read in several ways without erasing that explanation. It changes a jacket's balance; it asks the wearer to accommodate extra cloth; it makes the arm more visible in motion. The design decision turns an idea about effort into a physical adjustment. This is where the capsule's concept most clearly meets the body: not in an abstract declaration of solidarity, but in the way a sleeve gathers around an arm.
The presentation took place with Farzankia's art, and Kurrani said their work had been in conversation. The gallery was therefore more than a neutral runway substitute. An exhibition can focus attention for an evening; a bomber jacket has to continue making sense when it leaves that room. 7th Wave was at its strongest when its cloth and cut could carry the collection's thinking beyond the event that introduced it.
The bag and the carved handle
The Farangis clutch takes a related question into the hand. Its Termeh body has a wave-like contour, while a sculpted wooden handle makes the top of the bag a distinct object. Kurrani's product description credits a collaboration with French artist Alexandre Aréthuse and names ash, maple, oak and walnut in the wooden construction. The different woods introduce their own grains and tones. A bag made this way is not merely a patterned pouch with a handle attached; the grip and the cloth compete for attention and have to be composed as one form.
The clutch changes the relationship between fabric and support. A jacket hangs from shoulders, and its sleeves answer the movement of arms. A handheld bag must contain objects, close or open, and meet the fingers repeatedly at its handle. Kurrani places the harder, carved element where it is held. The softer patterned body hangs beneath it. That distribution lets the wood define the gesture of carrying while the textile supplies volume and surface. It is a smaller object than the bomber, but its construction makes the difference between materials even more immediate.
The Farangis product page leaves the name unexplained. Its curved outline recalls 7th Wave, though the listing gives no release date or confirmed place in the 2023 capsule. The wave returns here in an object carried by hand, its soft patterned body suspended from a carved handle.
There is an important distinction between a wooden handle being decorative and doing formal work. Here, the grain interrupts the Termeh's repeated pattern. The curve of the handle gives the cloth an upper boundary and turns a pliable bag into something that can be gripped as a small sculpture. The eye moves between the patterned weave and the marked surface of the wood. That exchange is another version of the Kotto blazer's meeting of unlike materials, but the demands of a carried object produce a different answer.
The soft clutches seen by the Copenhagen Post reporter had rounded bodies opening from shaped handles. The Farangis listing supplies more detail about one named example. Together they show that Kurrani was not treating the bag as a secondary accessory added after the clothes were finished. Its handle, volume and fabric were themselves fields for the same investigation into where a textile belongs and how it is used.
A bomber that can turn over
Another item in the label's catalog, the A8 bomber, makes the jacket's use a more direct design problem. The studio describes a rounded, oversized form that can be reversed. Long sleeves carry polished two-way zippers, allowing their openings and edges to change. The listing names coated Italian cotton for the main material, a lightweight lining and metal zipper trims. A reversible garment needs attention to the side usually hidden; the inside cannot simply be an afterthought. The zipper adds another means of changing what is exposed.
That design is different from applying Termeh to a blazer. It is less concerned with a conspicuous meeting of two cultural textile references and more concerned with the decisions a wearer can make. Turning the jacket over changes the visible surface. Opening a sleeve zipper changes how the arm is framed. The oversized rounded body gives those variations a consistent outline. Kurrani can ask what clothing means while giving its wearer a choice about how it looks on a particular day.
The bomber's reversibility complicates the idea that an exterior is always the finished face of a garment. Once the inside can be brought outward, seams, lining and closures matter in another way. The studio's product specification offers the wearer more than one arrangement, though it does not say exactly how each sleeve zipper behaves in use. The jacket makes room for change without losing its rounded outline.
That capacity for change relates to the more theatrical garments without making them identical. The 7th Wave bomber used volume and patterned material to bring a public cause into fashion. The A8 uses volume and reversibility to create choices in daily wear. A single silhouette can carry more than one line of inquiry. Kurrani does not need every piece to state a manifesto for the vocabulary of rounded shape, extended sleeve and altered surface to become recognizable.
Learning in Denmark, working between forms
Kurrani's route through Danish design education is documented by VIA University College. The school describes him as a design graduate in Herning and records an earlier venture, Enclave Monatchy, made with a team during his studies. That project explored change and transition in its own brand concept. The student company preceded his separate eponymous label, established in 2022. A collective venture and a later personal practice are different stages of a career, even if a concern with transformation runs through both.
In his interview, Kurrani also recalled studying computer technology and training as a pilot in Roskilde. Those paths belong to his Danish career, though he did not link either discipline to a specific garment detail. The label emerged from a life in Denmark that included several forms of learning before the 2022 launch. His design practice was made there, not carried into Copenhagen unchanged.
The first-person account also makes his relationship to the city particular. Kurrani said he was drawn to Scandinavian design's usefulness and simplicity while bringing other tastes and materials into his own work. The Kotto blazer shows that tension more accurately than a sweeping claim about East meeting West. Its body has the discipline of tailored outerwear; its sleeve lets another fabric and another volume enter. The A8 bomber makes usefulness explicit through reversibility. The Farangis clutch gives a patterned textile the support of a carved handle. Each piece finds a different way to bring an idea into contact with use.
For one month in 2023, his work occupied Mads Nørgaard's GUL project space in central Copenhagen. The temporary residency let people encounter the material at close range. Termeh's pattern, a bomber's gathered sleeve and a wooden handle are altered by scale, light and touch. An online photograph can show their outlines, but the designs ask how a person moves in the garments or carries the bag.
Kurrani described the 2023 capsule as a response to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and he spoke about his own departure from Iran during the aftermath of the 2009 Green Movement. His account places 7th Wave in a lived political history. Its cut, fabric and ability to carry a concept into use remain central to the work. The political and the material meet in the same piece.
The curve of the Farangis bag, the round of the A8 bomber and the fullness of the Kotto sleeve are not one repeated symbol. They are related solutions to distinct design tasks. A bag needs a handhold; a reversible jacket needs two usable faces; a blazer needs a shoulder and sleeve that can coexist with its body. Kurrani's practice finds room for patterned cloth within those demands. The result is most persuasive when the textile is allowed to do something, not merely to stand for where it came from.
That may be the clearest line through the clothes so far. Termeh, a textile traditionally associated with interiors, becomes a moving sleeve, a bomber's surface or a bag's body. Coated cotton holds its shape beside it. Wood carries its weight at the top of a clutch. A portrait embroidered on a jumper speaks plainly, while folds and volume leave more for a wearer to interpret. Kurrani's designs keep these differences visible. Their meaning does not arrive before the garments; it takes shape in the decisions that make them wearable.