Some garments announce themselves from across the room. A flash of hardware, a swing of pleats, a silhouette that refuses to sit quietly in the corner. The Chopova Lowena Carabiner Skirt is one of those rare pieces — recognisable from a single detail, the climbing clip that holds the whole thing together. It has become a signature, a shibboleth, and a small act of defiance all at once. Since its earliest iterations, this single skirt has carried the London label from a Central Saint Martins graduate project to international cult status, and it remains the clearest articulation of what designers Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena-Irons are arguing about contemporary dress.
The construction is deliberately hybrid. At its base sits a pleated skirt in the folkloric tradition — Bulgarian aprons, British kilt-making, and the piled textiles of Eastern European craft all feed into its DNA — cut from deadstock and vintage fabrics sourced with an almost archaeological persistence. Over this, the designers layer leather panelling, industrial hardware, and those now-iconic climbing carabiners, which fasten the skirt at the waist and hips rather than any conventional zip or button. The result is a garment that reads simultaneously as heirloom and harness, pastoral and post-industrial. Nothing about it is soft-spoken.
The Hardware Is the Point
Those carabiners are not decoration. They are the skirt’s entire fastening system, borrowed from climbing culture and subcultural uniform, then exaggerated into ornament. The effect is pure London: hardware-shop utilitarian, a little aggressive, entirely unbothered by the rules of traditional womenswear. Where a conventional kilt would close with a buckle or a strap, this one clips. It makes the wearer look like she might scale a wall or storm a stage — possibly both before lunch.
The hardware also solves a design problem. It allows the skirt to be adjusted, layered, and worn in ways that a fixed waistband never could. The carabiners become a kind of punctuation, marking the hips and waist with industrial accents that feel both practical and theatrical. It is engineering as embellishment, and it is why the piece photographs so well from every angle.
Folk Craft, Not Nostalgia
What elevates the Carabiner Skirt beyond novelty is its material ethics. Chopova Lowena built its practice on reclaimed textiles — vintage aprons, deadstock cottons, surplus trims — assembled in Bulgaria with a small, long-standing atelier. The skirt is therefore not a reproduction of folk dress but a genuine continuation of it, made by hands that know the source material. The pleats carry the weight of tradition without the dust of a museum. They move, they swing, they feel alive.
This is the brand’s entire thesis compressed into a single garment: the handmade and the industrial, the heirloom and the harness, the village and the city. Nothing is resolved, and that is precisely the point. The skirt holds its contradictions together with two climbing clips and an extraordinary amount of conviction.
A Coven, Not an Audience
Culturally, the skirt arrived at a moment when fashion was hungry for something that felt genuinely ungovernable. It has since been worn by musicians, stylists, and the broader coven of devotees the brand has accumulated — a following that treats the label less as a shopping destination than as an affiliation. That word, coven, is not incidental. Chopova Lowena’s community is deliberately framed as a gathering rather than an audience, and the Carabiner Skirt is its most legible uniform: a piece you wear to signal you are in on the joke, the craft, and the politics simultaneously.
The discourse around the brand has only intensified. Recent seasons have seen the label take its coven bowling for Spring 2027, with coverage from Vogue, WWD, Dazed and Hypebae all tracing the same thread — that Chopova Lowena has matured into one of London’s most consequential young houses without sanding off any of its strangeness. The opening of the Clubhouse, the brand’s first bricks-and-mortar retail concept, has extended that logic into physical space, prioritising experience and service over conventional merchandising. Collaborations with the likes of Dr Martens, rooted in craft rather than logo placement, have further embedded the label in London’s rising design ecosystem, while the involvement of artists such as Ecca Vandal speaks to a cross-disciplinary reach that few young brands achieve so early.
If the kilt has also drifted into the broader mainstream — the pleated skirt is now a recurring fixture in television wardrobes and high-street interpretations — that only sharpens the point. The Carabiner Skirt is the original article, and it wears its references openly. It is for the person who wants folk craft without nostalgia, hardware without militarism, and volume without apology. It is for someone who understands that a skirt can be a piece of engineering.
Why it matters now is simple: in a market saturated with quiet luxury and cautious minimalism, the Chopova Lowena Carabiner Skirt insists that clothing can still be loud, layered, handmade, and slightly strange. It is a garment that refuses to resolve its contradictions — and that refusal, held together by two climbing clips and an extraordinary amount of conviction, is exactly what has made it endure.
