Anja’s Graduation Outfit

I’m very honoured that both my children have asked me to make their graduation outfits. It’s been a very collaborative effort, where they have given me pretty specific design concepts and then I had to interpret their visions.

In Sweden the traditional dress code for the graduation outfit is white, but it’s certainly not mandatory. Anja wanted something less formal and more comfortable/casual, but still with a style element. So she came up with a blouse and wide-legged pants concept and we settled on good quality linen fabrics to give the outfit a more high-end look.

For the blouse, we opted for an off-white linen/rayon mix with a structured weave. This fabric so gorgeous up close and falls beautifully. I bought it in a fabric store here locally, but I’ve seen similar fabrics on FabFab Stoffe which has online shops in several European countries.

The sleeves I made with a subtle flutter style to honor the soft drape of the fabric.

The pants are made with an elastic waist for comfort (and elastic waists on woven pants are so trendy right now, maybe it’s a quarantine/work from home thing?). This fabric, a linen/cotton/rayon/elastane is in fact from FabFab and has really great structure too. It wasn’t our first choice, however, but due to some fitting issues of the first set of pants, I had to redo them only to discover that the original fabric was sold out.

An addition of elastane can be great since it prevents linen fabrics from sagging like crazy, but it also makes it stiffer, so I would have preferred a non-elastane fabric to be honest, especially since the pants are wide-legged and would have benefited from more drape.

Pockets of course, since my daughter is all about function first. Here you can see the nice structure that matches the blouse fabric.

Anja also wanted to only have decorative buttons with no proper placket. Which I’m honestly not a big fan of for more dressy styles, as I think it brings the look down a bit. So instead I constructed a proper placket and then topstitched it in place so you can’t open it.

If you are curious, stay tuned for a tutorial on how to do this and how to make sure the folds are even and exact, which is crucial when working with a semi-transparent fabric.

Stepping into the future! Anja told me she got a tonne of compliments for the outfit and that her classmates were impressed that I had made the clothes for her. That felt great, I’m always a sucker for a compliment 🙂

Of course, this graduation was toned down due to all the Covid-restrictions but we were still able to celebrate her in a socially distanced set-up outside.

And here is the graduation dress I did for my oldest daughter Stella three years ago.