Wednesday, December 10th 2025

Since launching in fall 2022, Ranra has specialized in designing garments that respond to real environments, from urban cities to nordic winters. We caught up with Arnar Mār Jōnsson and Luke Stevens to explore how they approach material, texture, and everyday movement. See their work up close at their first nyc pop-up, December 11–17, with an opening reception December 11, 5pm to late at Colbo Next Door.

1. Ranra has a way of making garments that feel rooted in real environments—weather, terrain, daily rhythm. Where does that instinct come from for you and what landscapes or references are informing your work right now?

It comes from growing up in places where weather isn’t abstract — it decides how you move, what you wear, and how long anything lasts. For us, clothing has to come from real environments. Lately we’ve been looking at northern winter surfaces: packed snow, cold soil, the dull shine of frozen plant fibres, and the way colour drains out of landscapes at that time of year. Those shifts in texture and tone naturally inform how we build the clothes.

2. When you begin a new body of work, what’s usually the first spark? A material, a landscape, a function, a story?

Always the material. If the material doesn’t speak, the rest feels forced. We start with fibres, structure, density and what the material naturally wants to do. From there the landscape usually comes in: how it behaves in the cold, how it hangs when wet, how it responds to light.

3. Your process often involves hands-on experimentation—dyeing, washing, distressing, reworking. What recent technique or discovery has shifted the way you think about making clothes?

We’ve been working a lot with slow, natural processes. None of it is dramatic, but it’s changed how we think about finish — letting the garment age into itself rather than dictating the final state. That slight unpredictability has become important.

4. Ranra pieces have this balance between ruggedness and softness, technical utility and something more emotional. How do you navigate that duality?

For us it isn’t a contradiction. Technical clothes can still feel human. Rugged fabrics often reveal softness once they’re worn, and emotional connection comes from use, not embellishment. We just try to design pieces that live in both worlds functional enough for real environments, but made with natural fibres and construction choices that feel grounded and calm.

5. Sustainability is built into your practice in a way that feels grounded rather than performative. How do you approach responsible making without losing spontaneity or exploration?

By treating responsibility as a design constraint, not a marketing angle. Working with mono-materials, natural fibres, and processes we can stand behind forces us to be more inventive. Limitation actually sharpens the work, you explore differently when the boundaries are clear. The spontaneity comes from the materials themselves and how they respond.

6. Are there particular pieces or details in this collection that you’re especially excited for people to encounter in person?

The wool pieces, definitely. The structure, the finish, the warmth of the material is something you only understand up close. And the new treatments we’ve done on outerwear fabrics give them a very physical surface quality that doesn’t translate in images. 

7. Looking ahead, what are you studying, collecting, or paying attention to that might quietly shape your next chapter?

Natural materials that behave differently in cold environments — waxes, oils, untreated fibres, slow-reacting dyes. Also small, functional rituals from Nordic winter life: how people store heat, dry things, build layers. These quiet, practical gestures often lead somewhere.