Avavav

AVAVAV was founded in 2018 in Florence by Italian designer Beate Karlsson as a contemporary luxury womenswear brand specifically focused on what Karlsson described as 'a deliberately-irreverent, deliberately-meme-aesthetic visual culture rebuilt as contemporary high-fashion.' The brand has been one of the defining post-2018 European-anchored 'meme-luxury-fashion' brands, with the deliberately-internet-culture visual references anchoring the broader brand cultural position. The AVAVAV vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deliberately-deconstructed knitwear with deliberately-meme-aesthetic graphic-motif references, hand-printed silk and cotton dresses with deliberately-internet-pop-culture references, the brand's iconic Finger Shoes programme (the defining 2022-era product — a deliberately-absurd toe-mimicking-finger leather shoe that became a viral social-media moment), deconstructed denim with deliberately-distressed construction, and a colour palette anchored to washed-pink, oxblood, ecru, washed-charcoal, washed-cream, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, electric-blue, butter-yellow, and the iconic meme-aesthetic colour combinations. The brand has presented at Milan Fashion Week each season since 2019. The brand is independent and held by Karlsson. AVAVAV operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Antonioli, the broader European luxury-streetwear specialty retailers, and a curated set of contemporary-meme-aesthetic specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more culturally specific post-2018 Italian-anchored 'meme-luxury-fashion' debuts, with the deliberately-internet-culture positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary 'viral-luxury-fashion' conversation that has been continuously rewritten since 2020.