REMEMBERING SOPHIA KOKOSALAKI

Sophia was one of those people whose impact is not measured in years, as they were too few anyway. Instead what you remember is the effect they had on their time. Remembering those London years, it’s a blur of laughs, art, clothes, friends, music, drama, and non-stop hard work, always with crazy deadlines. It was a rush and it felt important.

As a person she was tougher than leather, but constantly questioning herself and her creations. She wasn’t always sure but kept at it until she was. A good idea was never too much work. For her graduate collection, she spent six months embroidering words and ideas by hand into a jacket. Thousands of words and phrases. The next season, she turned that jacket inside out and lined it to cover over the sentiments forever. I wonder where that jacket is now.

We first met on a shoot in Greece; she was the stylist’s assistant for a magazine in Athens. At the same time, she was making and designing a clothing range and studying at university. She was wearing a sweeping knitted Ann Demeulemeester skirt, which knocked down a tripod and computer. I could only laugh.

Fashion was everything to her—and in a mid-’90s, pre-internet Athens, her knowledge was alarming. We bought all the same magazines and we listened to the same music. Joy Division, PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth, Courtney Love… Mostly female legends who really inspired, and it showed in Sophia’s work. It was these women she pictured in place of the mannequin as she handcrafted those amazing bodices.

A year or two after meeting, we were living together in London, she starting her MA at CSM, and I chasing my photography career. The years in our Covent Garden flat around the turn of the millennium were the most fun. Much whiskey, Marlboro Lights, and Greek chicken soup—enough to feed everyone visiting, all creative souls who gravitated towards Sophia and that little flat. So many passed through that place. Bobby Gillespie, Sarah Richardson, Alister Mackie, Guido, Panos Yiapanis, Richard Fearless, Ezra Petronio, Camille Bidault-Waddington, Jane Howe, just to name a few. They were people we admired from faraway Greece, and then here they were, throwing their weight behind Sophia. Suddenly her dream became real, and she worked tirelessly to achieve it.

Those formative years in London were often fraught with “drama.” I think that was one of her favorite words. I can still hear her saying it in a way that suggested, Don’t worry, we Greeks invented the word. We can fix it. Our non-Greek friends liked that about us, I think. But it wasn’t about our heritage, it was just in our nature—and mostly in Sophia’s. She never wanted to waste time or leave things undone.

The first show after Central Saint Martins cost £200 and three sleepless nights, setting up in a West End gallery basement. Camille, Venia, and Theo were there, along with all our friends, amongst a lot of faces we didn’t recognize but would see again and again thereafter. That’s how Sophia built it all. Season after season, she did something which came from her heritage, humor, and lifestyle, and each show saw more and more people coming to feel the excitement of the location, the soundtrack, the lights, her young model army, and of course the iconic clothes. I think she saw them as uniforms for her time.

She’s gone, but there is a special place in my heart for her. Sad, but so happy she got to show the world who she was.

Although my friendship with Sophia was collaborative, with me working at the studio, it was a friendship above all. Sophia was a force of nature—dynamic, witty, and intelligent, with a great sense of humor. She was curious, and her interests extended way beyond fashion to fields such as art and science. She valued knowledge highly, hence her studies in literature, and her work involved substantial research. Dominated by her passion for art, she often worked with shapes and forms straight on the mannequin, adding a couture feel to the garment. Our collaboration always entailed an exchange of ideas.

Sophia, generous by nature, encouraged people to learn and evolve, a rare attribute in competitive industries. The atmosphere at the studio was enjoyable and fun, a projection of her personality, with many happy moments as well as times of high pressure.

Life in the capital during the early 2000s offered so much culturally and socially. At the time, none of us thought too much of this circle of people who seemed to bond organically. Now, we cherish one another more than ever. Sophia and I share countless memories, chatting about a design-related subject after a day’s work or random daily news among friends at the local pub. I feel lucky to have been part of this circle, fortunate to know her bigger-than-life personality properly.

It felt like the right time to pay tribute, as this autumn marks five years since her passing. Sophia was charismatic and will always live with us, as she deeply impacted the people who knew her.

I met Sophia a few months after her graduation—in fact, just a few weeks following her first off-schedule London Fashion Week show. It was at the library at Central Saint Martins on Charing Cross Road.

What I found most striking was her voice: deep, assertive, confident, commanding almost.

A week later, I went to her flat on the third floor of 138 Long Acre, and I ended up working alongside her for 13 (!) years, growing a family-like bond. What was very evident from the start was the integrity and singularity of her vision. She was always questioning what makes a piece uniquely hers, and what characterizes her work as distinctively personal.

She loved playing with contradictory elements: a classicism versus a contemporary or streetwise look; feminine versus masculine; soft versus hard. She never liked girly nor overtly sexy. I remember her mixing fluid silk jersey with leather or draping the finest silk tulle around a harness made of army surplus belts. The result was jarring but paradoxically elegant and cool.

Craft and technique were central to her process. She had a genuine love for fabric manipulation and working in 3D. She was always looking for a novel way to create form and sculptural shape, always focusing on the female body. A certain distinct heritage was rooted in her point of view. Perhaps that’s what made her work difficult to classify. It was more subversive than straightforwardly beautiful.

Her fearlessness was also very evident. She never shied away from a challenge, whether it was creative or practical. It was incredible that she worked nonstop for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Athens during the summer of 2004 whilst undergoing intense medical treatment. She then went straight into her first show in Paris without financial backing or anything! Something as unthinkable and rare then as it is today.

She had a self-deprecating sense of humor. When Lee McQueen told her that she always worked on the bust because she was a Scorpio, she replied that it was only because that was her experience, sitting in front of the tailor’s dummy. “My zodiac sign might as well be a dog,” she said with a dismissive laugh. “Making light out of complexity” was the way Suzy Menkes described her Spring/Summer 2001 show. Sophia was incredibly proud of that review.

There was a connection between the principles reflected in Sophia’s work and her own stature, voice, and personality. Her innate understanding of classical articulation allowed her to twist and bend it at will, to match it with a love for subculture and urban grit or with the lineal magnetism of folk costume. An ancient site, a goth club, a shepherd’s gilet were all equal units in Sophia’s quest for form-making.

Some months before the Olympics, I was introduced by her right hand Theo to the idea of painting the fabric for Björk’s dress. I met Sophia for the first time, standing tall and with a sample in her Renaissance hands. There ensued a dazzling array of long days, in which Sophia and Theo designed an infinite phantasmagoria of clothes, fused with brilliant nights out fed by Sophia’s tireless enthusiasm. For Björk, I airbrushed succeeding degradations of cool colors on large-format organza and sailing fabric to evoke oceanic movement. In the autumn, I was asked again by Sophia to paint on leather using patterns from folkloric ornamentation; it was turned into headbands and belts which featured in her Spring/Summer 2005 collection, and subsequently in Vogue editorials.

Seeing Sophia in her London atelier amidst jaw-dropping samples, or before one of her breathtaking shows in Paris, even at the time felt like an incredible privilege—despite her unceasingly self-deprecating humor, which attempted to deal casually with all this genius and vision.

I met Sophia before her first show at a party in London. She was wearing a petrol-blue leather jumpsuit and her golden hair. We chatted and, in a corridor, she asked me if I would style her first show. I had no clue about her work but I said yes in a second.

She was living in a small flat in Covent Garden with Bill, and we started prepping it. I remember an olive green, a baby pale pink, some white lace, some leather. It was a micro team of two and it was intense and fun.

She had a brilliant taste in music and was channeling female strength through clothes; clothes that were delicate, fragile, and mega-bold at the same time. I remember laughing when we realized we did lots of tops and dresses, but forgot bottoms. I worked with her on a few shows, then Alister Mackie took on the baton, bringing a more goth-rock vibe that was very cool, too.

We stayed friends and I can still hear her voice—so dramatic, powerful, and free.

I think of her often: of her family that I met on a boat trip in Greece, her bossing around the captain while we were chilling out on the deck. I miss her, like all the people who knew her.

When I first met Sophia, she had just graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1998. I remember her vividly, in the vanguard of the army of individualists from everywhere, who the late Professor Louise Wilson was sending out. Sophia knew exactly who she was and what she wanted to do from the start: a tall, blonde, Greek new-wave goddess in a black leather jacket, determined to launch her fusion of feminist draping and rock-star cool on the world.

At the cusp of the millennium, Sophia emerged as prophetic leader of multicultural London, reshaping its reputation as a credible fashion capital. Her attitude was already sparking the ambition of younger people while she was at CSM.

“Watching what Sophia did was mind-blowing to me as a student,” Kim Jones once told me. “That incredible, elegant warrior-woman thing she did.”

She’d arrived from Greece already a hundred percent certain of who she was and what she wanted to do. “I was ready to abandon my home, my country, my lifestyle, my everything to get in,” she said. “I thought my life would end if I didn’t get in. It was either you take me, or I shoot myself!” The first time she applied, she turned up with three garments and no portfolio, and was sent away. “Because she was 16—this girl from Athens who was studying literature. Louise and I thought she was intriguing, had something, but she was far too young,” says Fabio Piras, now course director at CSM. “We told her to come back when she was 18. You knew she was one of those students totally focused on doing their own thing, launching their label.”

Her first shows in London were mob scenes. Sophia had many friends and fans in college who looked up to her, appreciating her sense of humor as much as her sophisticated vision of modern womanhood. Alexander McQueen was one of them. In February 2002, I spotted him shouldering his way through the crowd at her show; he was already at Givenchy, but Lee was there because he respected her as a talent at the leading edge of a different London generation. And he was lucky to have been there—we all were. That collection, I think, was the best she ever did: all black, with incredible collaged cut-outs and craft details, and references to traditional Cretan menswear.

In the beginning, her collections were very much in step with Nicolas Ghesquière’s early work at Balenciaga and Helmut Lang, while marching to her own music, the industrial beat of Kraftwerk and Joy Division. An individualistic, resourceful, independent force, she was also friendly, funny, and up for collaborations.

What was it about Sophia’s work, exactly? Her collections were poised between summoning the dignity of ancient powers and hot, female rock-star energy. Somehow, she was fusing her European heritage—classical drapery, Hellenic folkcraft—with a minimalist sense of how it could be worn on the street or in a club. In the mid 2000s, she shifted to show in Paris, consistently evolving ideas which grew from her background. Her roots were in Crete; her father, a civil engineer, and her mother, a journalist, were both born on the island—“the motherland, we call it,” she pointed out. She learned macramé from her grandmother on summer holidays, techniques which led to her abstract collaging of pieces of leather and fabric, strung together as conceptual bodices. Occasionally, they’d turn up over draped pants and baggy, pushed-down leather boots, inspired by costumes worn by Cretan villagemen. “I just think it’s amazing and kind of sexy—how often can you say that about folk costume?” she laughed. “It’s a bit ’70s, even rock, but in a primitive way!”

As a woman, Sophia was sophisticated, resourceful, and stoic. In 2004, she rose to the occasion when the Greek government asked her to design the Opening and Closing of the Athens Olympics. I visited her then to see her at work—organizing a cast of hundreds and dozens of seamstresses and set-builders in the secret, boiling-hot surroundings of the capital’s now-defunct airport. She pulled off friezes, floats, and performances which honored Greek myth, history, and culture in front of a global audience.

In the heady days of globalization, luxury fashion, and early internet reporting, she moved to Paris to show, taking a side gig at Vionnet in 2006 for two years. (She was perfectly cast as a draper of modern goddess dresses.) She then sold her brand to Renzo Rosso’s Only The Brave, parent company of Diesel. When the latter arrangement didn’t work out, she shifted to designing Diesel’s Black Gold collections for runway shows in New York before buying back her own label.

In what were her later years, Sophia refocused on making beautifully draped wedding dresses for non-frothy sophisticates, and on a jewelry collection stamped with her modernizing taste for Greek antiquity. A woman of great dignity, discretion, and good humor, she leaves a legacy of long friendships in London and Athens, who are both proud to claim her as their own. As she put it herself: “I am a Greek woman and a London designer.”

Sophia was a dynamic force, a modern-day Athena—warm-hearted, generous, funny, astute, Scorpion wit, sharp as nails, and direct… She said it as it was with tough love, but her underbelly was sensitive and kind.

I remember the day she left us. We’d not been as close in the last few years, catching up for the occasional girls’ night out, but had I had spent the late ’90s and early 2000s having nightly rituals with Sophia, Bill, and their group of (mainly Greek) friends, sharing our love of food, fashion, and fun. The nucleus of this community was Sophia, beautiful, powerfully enigmatic, and exceptionally talented and smart. When I heard the news of her passing, I was shocked. How could such a force of nature, with her level of passion, talent, and vibrancy, be taken from the world? It’s definitely a duller place without her.

I met Bill first when I was an assistant. We hit it off straightaway, and he said you must come and meet Sophia and see her graduate collection. Well, the collection was impressive—but Sophia was what made an impact. Amazonian and blonde with a New Wave twist, we instantly clicked. From that day, I was welcomed with open arms by Bill and Sophia into their Long Acre flat—nights laughing, dancing, eating, drinking, dressing up, and posing for photographs taken by Bill. (I remember a particular night, with Sophia and I taking turns copying the poses from a David Sims Self Service shoot, but with looks from Sophia’s collection.) She was, as they say, a firecracker.

But beyond Sophia the woman there was Sophia Kokosalaki the designer. Her aesthetic was authentic and original; she did not look at peer brands for inspiration, but instead was inspired by historical references, especially the Minoan civilization from her homeland of Crete.

Her modernist viewpoint and background in architecture, her love of New Wave fashion, film, and music—all these references were filtered into a strong, powerful, and unashamedly poetic vision of a contemporary goddess ready for pleasure and battle. This aesthetic was unique to her, from deep within her psyche. In fact, the Greek interpretation of Psyche is how I’d like to remember Sophia—the Greek goddess of the soul, often depicted as a beautiful woman with butterfly wings. After all, both Sophia and her designs conjure up this image.

Compiling this feature has surfaced so many vibrant memories, grand dramas, and often very beautiful moments: muling a suitcase of shoes to Paris for her show last-minute; wearing her blush-pink, leather-trimmed cotton voile dress to Camille Bidault-Waddington and Jarvis Cocker’s wedding in Normandy; getting hopelessly lost in the back streets of Venice during the Biennale; or dancing in her and Antony Baker’s kitchen at their Islington home into the early hours. They were stars at rustling up and hosting many an impromptu gathering, tables laden with Greek home cooking. She introduced so many to the true riches of Greece—its people, land, and culture.

I came to know Sophia when I interviewed her for Vogue, shortly after her MA graduation and her first New-Gen collection. We photographed her in an open-top limo with a toast of designer friends in Hyde Park. She was inimitable in her capacity to surface and embrace truth in all its myriad, paradoxical layers. A true Greek, she was ever ready to share and celebrate life, its cycles and its bathos, drama, tragedy, comedy, and beauty.

Many years later, and after the birth of her daughter, Stelli, we set off to Crete. Sophia was being awarded an Honorary Distinction by the region in 2018. “Crete is a culture that just keeps on giving. Every time I approach by boat or plane, I feel emotional,” she said. In a special exhibition at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, she pointed to a glazed ceramic figurine of an ancient Minoan snake goddess. Two arms outstretched, clasping serpents, exposed breasts circled by a tight bodice. The statue, which wears a multi-tiered chiton, dates back to 1650-1550 B.C. “The snake goddess is a favorite. I must have first laid eyes on her age six or seven. She represents power, beauty, and also an element of darkness that framed my aesthetic early on,” she said.

When I think of Sophia, that tiny figurine comes to mind. I like to imagine that ancient goddess offering her protection and guidance in a different realm. One thing is for sure: Sophia will be beaming with joy and pride on viewing this shoot.