Chopova Lowena SS27: Stay in Your Lane

At Bloomsbury Lanes, Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena build their season around two worlds that should have very little reason to meet. One belongs to Slavic spirits, witches and female supernatural figures passed through folklore. The other belongs to Marion Ladewig, the American housewife who became a champion bowler in an era that had already assigned women a much narrower role. The collection itself is titled X/Lucky Spirit Lost Strike/X.

The collision of Chopova Lowena SS27 is wonderfully odd, but the logic underneath is exact.

Both stories begin with rules.

The Witch Was Never the Problem

Long before the bowling ball begins rolling, Chopova Lowena SS27 lets witchcraft occupy the room without apology.

Black gathers around the body in restless layers, interrupted by lace, sharp triangular cutting and surfaces that seem pulled from garments passed between generations. Clothes never become historical reproductions. Folklore arrives through fragments, carrying enough familiarity to suggest ritual while remaining firmly inside the brand’s eccentric present.

That distinction keeps the collection alive.

Baba Yaga, Kikimora, Morana, Rusalka and the Samodivi enter the designers’ research as figures whose stories cross different regions of Eastern Europe. Their identities shift from tale to tale, sometimes threatening, sometimes protective, often difficult to contain inside neat moral categories. Chopova Lowena translates that instability through cutting, capes, dark bodices and restless surface work instead of dressing models as literal characters.

The witch rarely existed outside social judgement.

She frightens because she possesses knowledge, independence or power that cannot be easily supervised. The word itself has historically done cultural work far beyond describing magic. It identifies a woman who has crossed some invisible boundary of acceptable behaviour.

Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena make that tension explicit in their own show notes, which open by recalling a time when one of the worst things a woman could be called was a witch, before asking whether that time ever truly disappeared.

The clothes respond with little interest in rehabilitation. These witches are not softened into benevolent woodland heroines. Darkness remains. Sharpness remains. Even sensuality arrives with enough toughness to keep prettiness from neutralising the figures underneath.

Being feared, the collection suggests, may sometimes mean that somebody noticed you refused the role prepared for you.

Stay in Your Lane

A bowling lane is one of the simplest pieces of architecture in sport. Go forward. Stay inside the boundaries. Hit what has been placed at the other end. For Marion Ladewig, those instructions acquire another meaning entirely.

Her story brings 1950s femininity into the collection through rounded skirts, dropped waists, bowling shirts and athletic garments made with enough freedom around the arms to accommodate a swing. She had begun from the culturally familiar position of American housewife before becoming one of the defining female bowlers of her era, giving Chopova Lowena a muse who moved through convention without remaining confined by it.

That history saves the bowling theme from becoming novelty styling.

The circle skirt carries all the visual familiarity of mid-century domestic femininity, while sportswear introduces another kind of discipline. One dresses a woman for the home. The other gives her somewhere to aim.

The contradiction is almost too neat for Chopova Lowena, so the designers rough it up. Proportions tilt. Lace enters the jersey. Sport collides with folk decoration. Ladylike volume refuses the polished certainty associated with its original period.

Femininity begins moving sideways. And suddenly “stay in your lane” stops sounding like sporting advice.

Women have been given lanes for centuries. Good daughter. Good wife. Good mother. Good girl. The permitted route changes across time and culture, but the demand for legibility survives.

Ladewig’s bowling career makes the metaphor unusually satisfying because she does not escape the lane.

She claims it.

The same architecture designed to keep the ball inside strict boundaries becomes the place where skill, competition and autonomy are performed. Freedom here does not always require breaking every rule. Sometimes it comes from occupying a prescribed space so completely that its meaning changes around you.

The witch and the bowler begin to look strangely related. One is punished for straying outside the lane.

The other becomes extraordinary by learning exactly how to strike from within it.

The Uniform Refuses to Stay Put

Chopova Lowena has its own set of rules now. Tartan, pleating, folk craft, metal hardware and the carabiner skirt have become so recognisable that a single waistband can announce the brand before the rest of the outfit comes into focus. That level of recognition is an achievement for a young label. It also creates the obvious danger of turning an invention into uniform.

Chopova Lowena SS27 finds one of its better answers through modularity.

Apron-like sections and panels can be clipped, removed or repositioned, extending the logic already embedded in the carabiner itself. Official notes and runway coverage highlight modular Polish folk-inspired dresses and aprons alongside the brand’s familiar hardware language.

Development is subtle but important.

A carabiner is fundamentally a connector. Its usefulness comes from the fact that one object does not have to remain permanently attached to another. Yet fashion can easily turn functional hardware into ornaments once a signature becomes successful enough. Chopova Lowena brings some of that original possibility back.

The wearer receives space to reassemble the look, creating variations without waiting for the next collection to dictate them.

Neither the witch nor the bowler accepts identity as something perfectly fixed. One mutates through folklore every time her story crosses a region. The other moves from domestic expectation into competitive sport. Clothing designed to be rearranged follows the same logic.

Even the brand’s maximalism benefits.

Chopova Lowena often operates close to visual saturation, piling craft, sport, punk, romance and folkloric references onto the same body. Modularity gives that abundance a system. The chaos gains hinges.

The signature survives because it has learned how to move.

A Coven With Its Own Clubhouse

By now, the audience around Chopova Lowena has become almost as recognisable as clothes.

The shows attract tartan skirts already worn into personal uniforms, overloaded hardware, vintage knitwear and styling that seems to continue the runway beyond the official cast. That sense of belonging has now acquired a physical address through the Chopova Lowena Clubhouse in Bethnal Green, the label’s first permanent store, which opened in August 2026 with a custom skirt bar among its features.

Against that backdrop, the coven becomes difficult to treat as a decorative theme.

A coven is a group held together by shared practice, secrecy, identification and mutual recognition. Chopova Lowena has spent years creating clothing for girls who enjoy dressing as though consensus were somebody else’s problem. SS27 gives that outsider community a mythological mirror.

The casting strengthens the idea. Age does not remain tidily standardised, while dogs, eccentric beauty and characters with their own visual identities interrupt any possibility of a conventional procession. The runway behaves like a gathering whose membership is defined by enthusiasm, not polish.

Even later, softer passages avoid dissolving into innocence. Bias-cut shapes and more delicate surfaces emerge after the rougher witches and beasts, but sweetness arrives inside a universe that has already established its taste for oddity.

Belonging here does not require sanding down difference.

That may explain why the brand’s community language works where so much fashion talk about “community” becomes marketing fog. Chopova Lowena creates an extremely specific world and discovers that specificity attracts people who recognise themselves inside it.

The coven has rules of its own.

Crucially, they appear to leave room for weirdness.

Chopova Lowena SS27 When the Outsiders Get a Clubhouse

For years, Chopova Lowena has made clothes for people who look convincing outside the mainstream.

That position becomes complicated once the outsiders become recognisable enough to form their own institution.

The visual language can be identified immediately. The customer base has developed its own uniform. The Clubhouse gives that community a literal headquarters. None of those developments indicate creative failure. They indicate success.

Success, however, changes the problem.

Subculture is easy to romanticise while it remains marginal. Once its codes become desirable, stocked, photographed and reproduced, rebellion can harden into another set of expectations. The girl who once dressed strangely enough to escape a uniform may eventually discover she has joined a new one.

Chopova Lowena SS27 comes close to confronting that possibility.

Its witches belong to old traditions but refuse stable definitions. Marion Ladewig competes inside a lane without allowing the lane to decide who she can become. Modular clothing lets the wearer interfere with the finished design.

All of them point toward the same requirement.

A community survives when belonging does not become obedient.

The cleverest thing Chopova Lowena can do next may not be finding another obscure sport or another piece of folklore to collide with. That formula has become visible enough to eventually turn into a recipe.

The harder future lies inside the club they have already built. How strange can a uniform remain once everyone knows how to recognise it?

Chopova Lowena SS27 for now, rolls the ball down the lane and leaves enough room for it to curve.