Sandra Backlund and Maglificio Miles team up

Silvia Stein Bocchese, founder of Maglificio Miles set up in 1962, saw a legend in the making when she spotted Sandra Backlund’s knitwear designs. With the desire to reproduce the designs, Bocchese and Backlund decided to try to translate Backlund’s creativity using the most modern technology available at Miles.

Having worked with established names including YSL, Valentino and Sonia Rykiel, Miles is used to big challenges and used its years of experience to realise this project. The challenge was to produce high quality pieces inspired by Backlund’s hand made collections, but made a limited amount of manual work.

Sandra Backlund commented: “It was of course a big step for me to go from working alone in my studio, inventing pieces while doing them myself by hand, to suddenly be a part of a team of experts within a field of knitwear that I never before have had the chance to get to know. I was overwhelmed by all the possibilities I saw for this collaboration and even though it was a real challenge for me to learn to think in differently when creating, I now see how to develop my collections in ways that I never thought was possible.”

Sandra Backlund graduated from Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm in 2004, and launched label at the same time. Backlund approaches fashion more like a sculpture, and with her directional designs she won the Festival International De Mode & De Photographie in Hyeres. For AW07, she collaborated with Louis Vuitton, and she was selected by Franca Sozzani of Vogue Italia to be her protegé for the Protegé Project in 2008. Last season Sandra was awarded with the New Gen sponsorship in London.

Image: Sandra Backlund