No Front Row, No Escape: Avavav’s Female Gaze as Urban Surveillance

Avavav

Director Beate Skonare Karlsson

SøEdited Team
Article: Kellie Neilson
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe

​Avavav is a designer brand rooted in fine arts, sculpturing and childish humour - translated across apparel, accessories, footwear and objects. Founded by Creative Director Beate Skonare Karlsson, the design universe is built around her sculpted world of figurines. Avavav has gained worldwide recognition for its conceptual and humorous ideas, abilities to stir strong emotions and its pioneering silhouettes.

​Avavav’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection arrives wrapped in the language of disruption, but it ultimately reveals a more complex negotiation between concept and control. Staged as an inversion of the traditional runway, The Female Gazepositions the guest as the spectacle-an ostensibly radical gesture that collapses the boundary between observer and observed. Yet beneath its theatrical reversal lies a familiar tension: who controls the gaze, and can it ever be meaningfully redistributed within the rigid choreography of Fashion Week or in the coded performances of everyday urban life?

​The premise is seductive. Guests are led not to seats but into the show itself, walking alone through a corridor of models whose silent attention replaces the traditional audience. The absence of a front row suggests a dismantling of hierarchy, yet the experience feels less like liberation and more like a controlled passage. Closer to moving through a surveilled city space than an open act of expression. The participant is not freed from the gaze but re-scripted within it. Still framed, still curated, still performing. The power dynamic remains intact, only rotated.

​This tension extends to the show’s central claim. The “female gaze” is positioned as a corrective to historically male-dominated perspectives, yet here it risks becoming flattened into something singular and benign- quiet, contemplative, communal. In reality, the way women look at one another is far more complex, shaped by admiration, competition, insecurity, and desire. It echoes the subtle negotiations of public space, be that on streets, in clubs, on transport, where looking is never neutral. By smoothing over these contradictions, the show offers an abstraction rather than a fully interrogated perspective.

​The collection itself operates within this same ambiguity. Built on the idea of women dressing for themselves and for other women, it privileges character over conventional attractiveness. Hybrid garments, trouser-skirt fusions, engineered T-shirts, and silhouettes that shift categories resist fixed identity and binary codes. There is intelligence in this construction, particularly in how volume and closeness coexist, recalling the layered pragmatism of urban dressing, where function and expression constantly intersect. Yet the emphasis on imperfection as authenticity begins to feel aestheticised. What is framed as resistance risks becoming another stylised language, easily absorbed and reproduced.

​Moments of vulnerability surface in details like tissue-stuffed bras and references to adolescent femininity, hinting at the awkward process of becoming. But even here, the rawness is mediated. The awkwardness is curated, distilled into a visual form that remains legible within a luxury context. It gestures toward lived experience without fully surrendering to its instability—the kind of instability that defines real, unfiltered encounters in public space.
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The AVAVAV x Adidas collaboration focuses on reworking classic sportswear through a surreal, performance-art lens, blending Adidas’s athletic heritage with AVAVAV’s exaggerated, often ironic design language. Presented at Milan Fashion Week, the partnership transforms familiar pieces like tracksuits, hoodies and sneakers into distorted, sculptural versions that prioritise visual impact over functionality, leaning into the idea of “high fashion, low performance.” While some footwear in the collab includes playful, altered designs, these differ from AVAVAV’s separate collections, where fully foot-shaped or anatomical heels appear as part of the brand’s broader exploration of body distortion and absurdity.

The most compelling twist, however, lies in the role of the audience. By placing the guest at the centre of the runway, Avavav collapses the boundary between observation and participation. Walking the space is not just an act of being seen, but of consenting to be seen under pre-designed conditions. The discomfort arises not only from exposure but also from the recognition of how instinctively one performs, adjusting posture, pace, expression, and all, under the pressure of being watched.

In this sense, the show becomes less about reclaiming the gaze and more about exposing its internalisation. The models function less as judges than as mirrors, reflecting the participant’s own learned self-awareness. The gaze is no longer external; it has been absorbed, rehearsed, embodiedand shaped as much by the street as by the runway.
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Ultimately, Avavav’s FW26 presentation is most compelling not when it claims to redefine the gaze, but when it reveals its persistence. There is no clear outside position, no clean reversal. The system remains, diffused across everyone in the room and far beyond it. The audience does not simply witness it-they complete it.

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