As the fashion industry grapples with the idea of value, many people are talking about how and what we assign worth. That’s an issue Ranra co-founders and essentialists Arnar Már Jónsson and Luke Stevens agreed on before launching their own brand, which is dedicated to craft and materials. “For us,” they wrote in the show notes, “it was always about how clothes were made, and with what.”
The “what” this season is wool; 40% of the offering is made of it and the collection itself is called Fé. “Fé,” Jónsson explained, is the Icelandic word both for sheep and for money; as such it speaks to the importance of these animals to this Nordic culture. Or as the notes have it: “Wool here is more than a material; it is survival. It is the fiber that has protected generations, a connection between the past and present that we continue to build upon.” The rhetoric might be heavy, but the clothes and their execution are for the most part light and inviting.
Adding a bit of gravitas to the offering are shearling pieces. It’s the first time the designers have worked with the material, and they cut it into a reversible high-collared jacket. As always, the duo combined elements of traditional tailoring, workwear, and performance gear while breaking down the boundaries between clothes that can be worn inside and outside. Workwear fabrics are used for tailoring, and vice versa. And, noted Jónsson, “There’s never anything that’s just there for the sake of being there, there’s a performance value in every piece in some way.” Water-repellent pants shared space with trousers cut out of a felted wool that draped fluidly like a jersey. Wool and silk were combined into a ripstop fabric used for a parka, and there is a weightless all silk (outer, filling, lining) puffer in a persimmony-red.
With the exception of a fine quality nylon, Ranra clothes are made using natural materials—and dyes. Inspired by the Icelandic landscape, the palette this season is so rich you can almost taste the colors. Note the yarrow-yellow jacket, shades of lichen and bay-leaf, plus earthy tans and browns. Some of the materials have a sheen or iridescence as if they have been rimed by the cold country air.
The designers spent much of the last year with wool spinners and sheep farmers and their herds so they could understand the properties and history of the material. One of the hero looks in the collection is a handcrafted Icelandic sweater made of local wool and knitted in such a way that it is seamless. This stand-alone piece (which Icelanders traditionally wear over coats, Jónsson specified) feels like a metaphor for what Jónsson and Stevens want to accomplish through their brand. Among their goals are circling back to some traditional ways of doing things, and leaving an almost invisible footprint in the making of discrete, yet memorable, clothing.