Brighton Fashion Week which runs from October 8 to 12 showcases innovative collections by emerging designers. Nowhere is this more evident than the ShowReel event, which is all about costume and eccentricity. Hannah Collisson meets Freya von Bulow – one of those guaranteed to make an entrance with her paper couture designs.

I am welcomed through an unmarked door leading off a nondescript side street in Hastings, and led up a flight of steps into a lofty warehouse, where a fitting is underway.

A model stands encased in intricately constructed layers of tissue paper and foil as Freya von Bulow, inset, stapler in hand, makes adjustments.

With strip lighting, and trains rumbling past on one side, this is the ultimate bohemian studio, and unusually for a costume designer, there is not a sewing machine in sight.

Instead, hanging from the rafters and draped across one half of the space are white tissue paper creations of all descriptions; a knotted cloak is spread on the floor, a skirt finely cut to resemble the softest feathers.

Freya’s first Brighton Fashion Week collection, I Dream of Apocalypse, is theatrical in nature.

“It is 12 garments that chart the human journey from just after the apocalypse.

“The first garments are going to be about getting up out of the ashes, with trauma and death all around, everything is torched, everything is burnt down - I have been experimenting at home, with burning the paper and then recovering it.

The final piece is going to be the one god-like superhuman, the plan is that the dress will cover the whole of the catwalk Paper couture is Freya’s passion, she uses specially treated, slightly opaque tissue paper, which is specially imported from Germany – the direct result of a serendipitous conversation she had with a stranger on a plane, a man who turned out to be a paper manufacturer.

Originally from Hamburg, she studied illustration at Brighton University, and The move into paper couture came after she agreed to organise the Front Row Fashion show, which has grown into a hugely successful event held at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, and provides a platform for upcoming designers to showcase their ethical and sustainable creations.

“I was doing my illustration degree, we were making books, and there was a lot of paper art.

“I was bored just doing all the admin for the fashion show – I wanted to make a collection. The first year I made three dresses.”

Freya has showcased her designs at exhibitions including at the Photokina Photographic Trade Fair in Cologne, and the Haptik Awards at Drupa Paper and Printing Trade Fair in Dusseldorf.

She has also been featured in the Sunday Times Style magazine, wearing one of her own creations, and is currently working on collaborations with projection artists, making fashion films.

Apart from the tissue paper, all the elements of her pieces are constructed from recycled materials, including the bodices which are made from papier-mâché.

She shows me a box of silver drawing pins, from which she has meticulously removed the points that will among other things be used to trim head pieces.

The cardboard insides of rolls of masking tape can be covered in foil and transformed into bangles.

“All my accessories are cardboard, masking tape and tissue paper. It works, and it’s great because the materials are not expensive, so you can play around and it’s OK.”

“I love using things that are readily available. It’s about recycling. All the cardboard we got from the carpet place down the road.”

This is disposable couture. Despite the many hours of work that go into each piece, they will only last a single evening, but that is a key element of Freya’s work. She never makes the same piece twice.

In fact she has plans to burn the entire collection following the Brighton show, as a performance piece, which ties in with the apocalyptic theme of the collection.

  • The ShowReel Showcase is on Sunday October 12, at Sussex Masonic Centre, Queens Road, Brighton. Tickets are £20. Visit www.brightonfashionweek.com