Maja Stabel

Blending illustration and embroidery, textile art and sustainable fashion, Maja Stabel has always forged her own creative path. Now she wants to bring her work to a global audience.

“New treasures”. That’s Maja Stabel’s vision for the clothes she designs and upcycles. “What I am interested in is clothes as pieces of art, like new unique treasures,” she tells Localfolk. “Anything can become a treasure – from an old blanket to a curtain”.

Maja makes textile pieces, illustrations, and zero-waste clothing from sustainable and second-hand materials, from her family home on a farm near Trondheim. Her work challenges the boundaries of fashion, design, and creative practice. And, although she characterises herself as a designer and textile artist, she’s uncomfortable with these conventional artistic identities. “Designer, illustrator, artist – I want to get rid of all these labels!”, she says. “I’ve spent a long time thinking about how all the aspects of my practice fit together. Now, I’m letting go of everything and just doing what I love. I believe we should all do that, because that’s when treasures are made.”

Maja’s fluid creative approach – combining illustration and watercolour with sustainable fashion and embroidery – is testament to her varied career. One of the first students to study Sustainable Fashion Design at KEA in Copenhagen, she was commissioned after graduation by the designer, David Andersen, to produce a fashion line focusing on zero-waste techniques. “This zero-waste thing was very new at the time”, she explains, “and I was trying to figure out how to make it work. The challenge of trying to use every part of the fabric has helped my creative process ever since!”

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But after her time in Copenhagen, Maja returned home to Norway, to start her own illustration practice, to study pedagogics, and to share the techniques, principles, and skills of zero waste through community workshops. “I love to have live workshops, although it’s been a long time since I have done that now”, she says, citing the pandemic. These experiments in co-creation have given her an opportunity to incorporate teaching and community into her work – practices and values that she says aren’t always welcome in the conventional fashion design business model.

While live education is still off the cards for the timebeing, Maja has spent the pandemic between her farm and her studio in Sluppen working to make her production more sustainable. “One of the hardest things has always been to source quality sustainable materials,” she tells us, giving us an insight into what happens behind the scenes. “While I’ve worked with local second-hand retailers in the past, these didn’t always work out. Now, second-hand fabrics are starting to sell so much that it is difficult to get your hands on the materials for different reasons – and that’s a good thing!”.

But she’s found a solution. She’s now collaborating with XV Production, a textile manufacturer in Borås, Sweden. They provide the second-hand materials and work to produce the garments to Maja’s design. And from these old tablecloths, or flowery curtains, they are together able to produce what she calls “unique treasures with exceptional quality and craftsmanship”.

It's that word again: treasures. “That’s kind of my philosophy”, she says. “Second-hand things can be upcycled into something of so much more value.” In this way, the beauty and value of clothing, for Maja, is fundamentally linked to sustainability.

“Sustainability, essentially, is about going inside ourselves and mending ourselves – not making ourselves feel better just by consuming stuff”, she explains. “I think that we need to go back in time in how we treat our clothes. Everything you purchase should mean something to you, should speak to you. And I want to create clothes that do exactly that.”

To conclude, we ask her about her ambitions – and she’s wonderfully frank. “I want my brand to be known all over the world! I think it is important to have big aspirations. My aim is to get my message out to more and more people. That’s my mission.”

MAKER INTERVIEWS TRONDHEIM/TRØNDELAG

VOL III