36 years old, Danish
2012: Muuse Prize (assigned by Vogue Talents) as Most Promising Designer
2012: Nomination at Costume Awards as Best Emerging Designer
2011: Young Vision Award
My wheel is the female body!
The shape of our inner self and thoughts.
Our softness and fragility, our perfection and beauty. The shape of the dress, the round lines, the handmade textures (dynamic and slow fashion) takes us back in time and brings back the old handcrafted tradition.
This dress symbolises the tyre – the mixture of rubbers, combined to create the perfect match.
I don’t follow fashion trends. My creations are timeless with thoughts and hearts from back then...
It comes, it goes, it comes and it goes – and we must take part of it further and make a circle of a lifetime full of personality and beauty.
Heidi Paula Langvad is a Fashion Designer from Denmark, known for her dark, feminine style and use of traditional craftsmanship and local products.
Her work is featured on numerous fashion sites and blogs, including Vogue. She was the recipient of Muuse's most promising designer award from VOGUE talents 2012, as well as their Young Vision Award in 2011.
She was also nominated for Best upcoming Designer from the Costume awards 2012.
For a fashion designer Heidi is an introverted and shy person, carrying around her manikin at all times as a defensive tool as much as a comfort – and this proved to me that her work went beyond the façade, beyond the textiles to something deeper and more philosophical.
She understands clothes in an experiential sense, they are not just for the external viewer, but more importantly for the wearer; they reflect something more meaningful back at them, and her designs include minute details not apparent to anyone other than the wearer. They are expressive, but not only outwardly.
She explored the curvature of the female body in relation to the wheel. Heidi talked articulately and eloquently about women and clothes, and how women wear their clothes. She looks at the relationship between the two; the material and the body, but understands that, ultimately, a woman wants to look good, and wants her clothes to make her feel empowered and not vulnerable. She carried with her a fascinating book of ideas, aphorisms, stories (interestingly) and design, which was the chronicle of the dress that she presented to us. This proved that the process is not simply one of choosing materials and design – the physical preparation – but cerebral too. The dress, the finished item, is an amalgam of intellectual methods, which we might not have expected.
The stark but graceful dress she presented was a testament to Heidi’s creative vigor. She is an all-round talent, thinking beyond the limits of her medium, verging on the polymath.
[Hanif Kureishi]
Do you consider your talent a gift or a burden?
A gift, of course, who doesn’t want to make women feel and look beautiful and confident?
What you would do if one day you woke up and discovered you had lost your talent?
Build up another one! Work hard, learn, make mistakes and work even harder – go with my passion always.
It´s all about what´s happening in our minds and how much we want it.
Who is the living talent you most admire?
Peter Doherty
What do you like about your talent and what don’t you like?
I have the ability to empower women.
When or where does your talent make you happy?
When a stranger, one day, told me. “Hey! You not only create clothes, you create beauty”!
When I can see women strolling in my creations!
Small femmes fatales ruling the world with their passion.
If you could change your talent, how you would change it?
I don’t want to. And I can´t see how it is possible to change what is so much a part of my personality.
