Pigeons: an ode to London’s urban outcasts
CSM-trained fashion designer Samuel Friberg reimagined his scavenging lifestyle in London warehouses into a graduate collection fueled with stains, angst, aggression, grittiness, but also elegance and a love for nature. I followed him around for the past three months to reveal every bits that feed into this collection.
Samuel Friberg (far right) in the backstage of the 2024 bafcsm press show.
Photographer: Anderson Hung
When trying to describe Samuel Friberg, two words would come to mind instantly – unapologetically nomadic. The 32-year-old fashion designer has manifested the “nomadic” literally, having grown up in Marseilles, moved to Sweden, and now studying at London’s Central Saint Martins. Before moving into his current dwelling in Haringey, Friberg spent the majority of his 10 years in London living in warehouses around London, everywhere from Hackney Wick to Clapton.
Friberg’s scavenging lifestyle followed him from warehouses to his spacious and sunlit bedroom now stacked with boxes of found materials. On the carpet lies a briefcase of broken windshield glasses, a box of electronic cables his college’s digital studio has discarded, and old bicycle chains and tyres from his local repair shop – to name a few. “I’m taking a lot of inspiration from years that I have lived in warehouses, where we used to find furniture in the streets and build homes together,” says Friberg.
In the following two months, these materials will be cut open, punctured, deconstructed, then knitted, crocheted, sewn, and welded together, eventually becoming what is part of Friberg’s graduate collection. On the cover of his sketchbook prints a photo of pigeons he took in Central London, superimposed by the title “Pigeons,” made ransom note style with letters from car emblems.
“Pigeons is about characters that live in a cityscape who are trying to adapt to the machine they're part of, but also trying to make it better from the inside,” explains Friberg. “Pigeons are usually not welcomed in the city but they have adapted and strived.”
On the other hand, in his own narrative, Friberg thought of his fellows from his warehouse years and came up with a character for each look he is designing — so far, a punk rocker, a climate activist, a guerilla gardener, a metal head, and a shamanistic healer — all imagined in his sketchbook in a style that’s somewhere in between steampunk and cyberpunk. Friberg, flipping through the pages, only made it more convincing by wearing his signature retro-motorcycle goggles and a grungy, laddered jumper.
On Friberg’s moodboard also lies the cult classic Dirty Girls, a 1996 Micheal Lucid documentary about two teenage riot grrrls in Los Angeles ostracised by their upperclassmen for allegedly having bad hygiene. “It sums up how I feel about people wanting others to wear stainless clothes and to smell nice,” explains Friberg. “I don’t relate to that, sweat is sexy and stains happen.”
Like a “mashup of Enya and The Prodigy,” as Friberg aptly puts it, the essence of a warehouse lifestyle is in its duality. “It is to create something harsh and beautiful at the same time,” the designer adds. To expand on the music references, Friberg proudly points his finger at the t-shirt he is wearing, which reads Myrkur, a black metal project by Danish singer Amalie Bruun. “She got so much hate because the black metal community is very misogynistic,” but she continued to create her signature style of black metal, which Friberg calls “beautiful horror.” The same conflicting, queer duality is found in Placebo, whose t-shirt Friberg wears on the day of his lineup, infamous for their gender-bending voice and appearances.
The same ideas apply to Friberg’s designs. “All the materials I’m using are gritty and aggressive but I’m turning them into something elegant.” What appears to be a lustrous leather jacket is actually reconstructed layers of flattened-out tyres. What looks like an open-knit sweater is in fact paralleling bicycle chains crocheted with a web of threads. Steel floorings were torched to create a dreamy, cyan tint, juxtaposed with the tyre treads whose texture looks like that of a cable knit from a distance. The bike chains were also naturally rusted and used to create organic stains through shibori dyeing techniques. The collection is made so elegant that during the lineup his course leader Sarah Gresty has to tell him to “rough it up.”
The sense of duality in Friberg’s work – especially the inventiveness that transforms an old material into a new one – dates back to his upbringing in idyllic Scandinavia. “Being half-Swedish taught me to be respectful of nature,” reminisces Friberg. “When I was a kid I picked wild berries and mushrooms, at school I had trips to the woods, even when I became a rebellious teenager, I raved in the forest.” Naturally, Friberg laid the foundation of his creativity in what is connected to nature and what protects it, avoiding virgin materials whenever he could.
During the pandemic, lockdowns made fabric and material stores inaccessible, but it wasn’t a problem for Friberg, who just started his degree course then. That was when the designer started making clothes from materials he found on the street - from tearing upholstery fabric apart to dyeing them with wild fuchsias. Now making his final collection, when Friberg isn’t working in his studio, he is likely in the college’s canteen collecting discarded onion peels, in restaurants outside of college collecting avocado skins, or in the natural dye workshop boiling every bit he collected to prepare them for dyeing.
After the dyeing process, the large sheets of recycled fabrics were hung up to dry in Friberg’s backyard. “Our landlord would be so confused if he walks in now,” jokes Friberg, who was in his yard grinding sheets of metal, as bike chains sit in the sink to have their oil lubricant removed and the washing machine covered in seaweed after he attempted to wash a 60-metre long fish net stuck with sulphury odour.
Friberg’s never afraid of getting his hands dirty; in fact, he enjoys it tremendously. Before settling for Pigeons, he wanted the collection to be called Rage Against The Machines, inspired by his angst towards the cost-of-living crisis, ongoing wars, and out-of-touch politicians. “With everything piling up I don’t want to stitch small, polished garments, I want to break things and put them back together.” And Friberg did, eventually in a much more poetic way that still retains the experimentative rawness of his energy.
The spiral structure of the telephone coil cords made an intertwining crochet with the interlocking structure of the bike chains, altogether providing a structure for an oversized hoodie made with military surplus tents dyed with avocado skins and lac. Bike inner tubes were weaved into rust-dyed white denim to form a chequered pattern and left naturally draping over the ground like a dress train.
As one of the six students in the Fashion Print programme who got selected to show on the press show, Friberg sends his models off onto the runway. As Nordic industrial metal, an apt soundtrack for Pigeons, plays on The Street of the college, “peace for Palestine” student protestors blast air raid sirens that almost echo with the same rage that fuels Friberg’s collection.
“I’m starting my own Pigeon community,” says Friberg determinedly when asked about his next step, followed by laughter. The designer, now a Central Saint Martins graduate, has already found a collective of like-minded people, much like his warehouse comrades, and is ready to bring his creativity back to the world.
