Ninety Percent names new head of design

Profit-sharing fashion label Ninety Percent has appointed former Cos senior womenswear designer Louise Langkilde as its new head of design.

Ninety Percent said that Langkilde, who also previously consulted for Helmut Lang, will be working closely with the label’s creative director Para Hamilton to introduce her Scandinavian aesthetic and build on the brand’s idea of a wardrobe designed to last and adapted to several seasons and occasions.

Langkilde’s debut collection for Ninety Percent is resort 2022, described by the label as a “shift in aesthetic” and its first fully vegan collection.

“The key for me is to design for longevity, and have products that you want to have in your wardrobe for a very long time,” explains Langkilde in a statement. “It’s important for me to be working in a sustainable way. The longer the product lasts, the less impact it has on the environment.”

The new aesthetic is a more “timeless, yet luxurious style,” which Ninety Percent states build upon its brand ethos of timeless design and thoughtful, long-lasting fabrics while also introducing soft tailored layering pieces and playful athleisure silhouettes.

Resort 2022 is also 100 percent vegan, with Ninety Percent moving away from traditional sheep wools in its knitwear towards a ‘fluffy’ GOTS-certified organic cotton alternative to create its new chunky hoodies and shrunken crew neck sweaters.

Ninety Percent unveils first fully vegan collection for resort 2022

The new resort 2022 collection builds on the brand’s foundation of executed sweats and detail-driven jersey essentials to introduce soft tailoring and knits to create a wardrobe where feminine pieces compliment the sweats.

Langkilde added: “I wanted to create a truly modern wardrobe for how women live now. The sweats still form the base of the brand but we’re refining the fits and evolving the details. Now the busy Ninety Percent woman is wearing her tailored tracksuit bottoms with an elevated knitted tunic. It’s about mixing it up.”

Ninety Percent adds that the collection is filled with “wearable modern classics,” designed for longevity. This includes soft tailoring in the form of a Tencel rib shirt dress, fluid culottes and a split-front skirt, styled in the lookbook with a casual smiley logo sweat, as well as transeasonal outerwear, including a brushed organic cotton kaftan-style anorak and a cloud fleece funnel neck popover.

There is also a focus on knitwear with traditional wool making way for innovative “fancy yarns,” including a ‘hairy’ organic cotton where the fibres have undergone a combing process to create a strong and compact yarn with a fluffy texture that is then knitted in a fisherman’s rib stitch to give the fabric a luxurious, lofty volume.

Ninety Percent appoints Louise Langkilde as head of design

The conscious fashion label also adds that every knitwear piece in the collection is “fully fashioned,” meaning that each individual garment piece is engineered so that it is made with no extra fabric, in a ‘zero waste’ process. Whilst the garments are knitted by machine, the construction of the seams is done by hand in a process called ‘linking’.

Resort also sees the introduction of a new, silky jersey fabric, crafted from premium plant-powered fibre, SeaCell, derived from seaweed and produced at a Lenzing facility. SeaCell harnesses the strength of the brown algae from the unique ecosystem of the Icelandic Fjords. The seaweed harvested uses entirely sustainable and regenerative methods.

“I’ve always been inspired by finding new fabrics and being amazed at what they can do”, added Langkilde. “It’s so important that what we do is sustainable and made in a responsible way. It’s also incredibly inspiring the amount of research that goes into it.”

Ninety Percent resort 2022 drops on December 6 exclusive on its website ninetypercent.com, with prices ranging from 35 to 165 pounds, with select vegan knitwear up to 250 pounds.