How designer Johanna Parv crafts ‘practical magic’ for the body and mind

Some people have really beautiful elbows,” says fashion designer Johanna Parv, thrusting her arm towards me to observe. She’s dashing around her cosy east London studio – an ex-frame factory that first opened in 1900 but is now home to a flock of artists, designers and other tormented, yet impeccably dressed, creatives.

It’s a grey day outside and the studio isn’t much brighter, just a blur of dark, tonal materials. Parv’s demeanour makes up for any lack of colour. The 31-year-old is vibrant and passionate, with a punchy, blunt assuredness that will catch you off guard. Each time she sits down she’s up again within 30 seconds, throwing sample after sample in my direction, demonstrating how her clothes can conceal or reveal different parts of the body (hence the elbow thrusting).

“It’s not just boobs that are sexy!” she insists, and she’s not wrong. Whether revealing or not, her creations are undeniably sexy. Using predominantly Lycra, stretch nylon and wool, Parv’s designs make for great alternatives to lovers. They hold you in all the places you want to be held; they move with you, whatever your pace may be; they’re adaptable, and allow you your much-needed breathing room, should you desire it.

“I’m not really interested in fashion so much,” she tells me. “I appreciate the history of fashion, but I’m not bothered about the fuss of it. I’m much more interested in creating products that really are a composition of beautiful fabrics and ideas – things that offer a function. Flattering for the body and the mind.” Her work pairs slinky 90s neck-lines with technical tailoring. Swooping asymmetrical skirts (her bestseller) meet body-clinging cycle shorts, and are topped off with industrial belt-bags, accentuating the hips. Parv has gone boldly where no other designer has been, discovering a seductive sweet spot between sportswear and eveningwear.

That said, she’s keen to avoid her work being labelled as sportswear. “Some people see Lycra and assume it’s sportswear,” says Parv. “I prefer engineered formalwear. It’s not designed to go to the gym, it’s not designed to run [in]. I worked for a sportswear brand for three years and I know there are better products for running. In sportswear everything is super ergonomic and aerodynamic; if I call it sportswear then I’m really offending people who do that.”

Her clothes may not be made for the gym, but they are made for maximum function – “It’s seasonal, it’s warm, it’s structured, it’s tailored” – with what women really want at the forefront of everything Parv does. “I’m an independent woman in a big city,” she says. “I’ve been by myself in big cities since I was 18. I feel like my duty as a womenswear designer is to ask women, ‘So where would you put a pocket? What kind of trousers do you actually want to wear?’ We should always ask the questions we think we already know the answers to.”

“I have a friend who works for a big fashion house,” Parv continues, a note of anger in her voice. “I heard they take mannequins and they hammer the boobs down in order to make things look good. Everything is designed for photographs but not for real humans. These women don’t exist.”

I ask her who the Johanna Parv woman is. “Masculine women. Androgynous. Some people say, ‘Johanna likes to go for the lesbians!’” she says, laughing. “They’re independent, free souls, but refined at the same time. I never imagine young girls, [I imagine them] more mature. I like smart, intelligent women.”

Parv’s mother, a jewellery and childrenswear designer, was the first woman to inspire her. Born and raised in the Estonian capital of Tallinn alongside her two brothers, she was crafting garments by the time she was six and produced her first collection at the age of 15. She was the type of teenager who did it all and was frustratingly good at it all. She sang, she danced, she trained in theatre, but where she really excelled was on the running track.

“I was like the third-top runner in the Baltic states,” she remembers. “I was in training from the age of nine. I had a boy’s body and my period was late because I was doing so much sport. I think I’m quite competitive because of that. Did she dream of the Olympic Games? “No, because I didn’t want to be a runner forever.”

While her mother nurtured her creative abilities, her father, an engineer, instilled an appreciation of structure and form. It makes sense, then, that her parents’ professional backgrounds combined with her talent for athletics would lead to an interest in producing highly functional, moveable, “engineered formalwear”. Rooted at the base of the household, as with many Estonians, was practicality. “It’s so cold that it’s a much more practical approach to clothing,” says Parv. “Estonia only became independent when I was born, so its understanding of fashion hasn’t really developed. It’s all about reusing and sharing clothes. I grew up wearing my mum’s clothes; she grew up wearing her mum’s clothes, or something we found and fixed. It’s a very eastern European mindset.”

Despite Estonia’s separation from the fashion world, Parv began pursuing her career seriously in her teens. At 18, she uprooted her life to London to study BA womenswear at Central Saint Martins – though her former lack of access to the industry soon started to show. “I was going through all the books in the Central Saint Martins library and I stopped on Prada. I said to my friends, ‘Do you guys know this brand, Prada?’ I didn’t even know what Prada was,” she admits. “If I told my father I was going to work for Givenchy he wouldn’t know what it was. If I say ‘LVMH’ in Estonia, people wouldn’t know it. To me, H&M was luxury.”

Twelve years since discovering the brand in the corner of the library, today, she cites Miuccia Prada as one of her favourite designers, alongside Coco Chanel. “A lot of people think Chanel is old-fashioned now, but I went to the exhibition at the V&A and I cried; I burst into tears. Where she came from and what she built is so personal to me. She’s my muse as a designer.”

“I went to the Coco Chanel exhibition at the V&A and I burst into tears. Where she came from and what she built is so personal to me. She’s my muse as a designer”

Another of her muses is gender-blurring Tilda Swinton in the film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, Orlando. Much like Orlando, Parv has spent the past decade playing chameleon in unknown realms. She spent eight months in Paris, working between Balenciaga and Christian Dior, did a three-year stint with sportswear brand Soar Running, and later went to work as an accessories designer at Burberry. She received her master’s degree from CSM and, last year, became the latest recruit of Fashion East, Lulu Kennedy’s esteemed fashion incubator that helped launch the careers of Jonathan Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner and Kim Jones, to name a few.

Having shown her final collection with Fashion East in February this year, Parv is about to fly solo for the first time, dauntingly, without financial support. But of course, our impressively practical designer isn’t panicking. “My mum always said, ‘Don’t be afraid of being in the field by yourself.’ I just have to keep going and be brave. You can’t worry about things like that. It is what it is, something else will come. Relying on external forces is not good.”

For now, she’s working on a new collection that she plans to show in Milan this June (she would rather show in Paris, but the Olympics has got in the way). She’s also keeping a hopeful eye on Newgen, the British Fashion Council’s initiative supporting emerging design talent – “Without Newgen I would have to do something else. Because I wouldn’t have the money to put on a show.”

I wonder if she would consider following in the footsteps of many previous Saint Martins alumni and work at a fashion house, although it’s a question I already know the answer to. Johanna Parv is Johanna Parv’s only focus: “My ideal would be to get enough support for my own business that I can just be the creative director of my own brand,” she says. “I really don’t think there’s anyone doing what I want to do, and I really believe in what I want to do.”