What Copenhagen Fashion Week looks like now for these Danish designers
What Copenhagen Fashion Week looks like now for these Danish designers
With travel curtailed and large gatherings off limits, the future of fashion weeks – at least as we know them – looks uncertain. So what’s the alternative? Ahead of Copenhagen Fashion Week, starting on August 9, some of Denmark’s most influential designers discuss the pervasive impact the global health crisis has had on their new collections and how they’ll be ‘showing’ them this season
“It’s time to rethink business as usual; we are super-excited about the opportunity to do something different this fashion week. Nothing beats the high a show gives you, but then it’s also all over so quickly. This season, instead of a traditional runway show, we’ll be hosting a three-day exhibition that will run during Copenhagen Fashion Week. We’ve asked six female creatives what the 2020s will bring, and invited them to collaborate with us in different mediums. I love the energy that comes from collaboration; it’s what we do best. Right now, creating a more long-lasting experience that can be viewed both physically and digitally feels right – but who knows what tomorrow will bring? The SS21 collection is much smaller than usual; it’s a chance for us to really CHAMPION our design darlings and hero styles, resulting in a more curated selection. Basically, we’ve gone back to our DNA. The design process became a labor of love. As a team, we were all juggling family life with work and working from our kitchen floors, but our check-ins were regular and much more honest – physically, we were apart, but we’d never been closer.”
“The pandemic has definitely had an effect on my design process; it’s clear to see in my SS21 collection, Wild Beauty. I knew I needed to make my designs clearer than ever before and be extremely selective in terms of my ideas and process. I had to think carefully about the world I was creating jewelry for – and actually, going FORWARD, I hope this sense of focus is something I can hold on to. As a jewelry designer, your hope is to create pieces that matter and can be passed on for generations, and that idea feels even more crucial now. This season, I was inspired by an image I found of the artist Henri Matisse holding a dove of peace in his hands while sketching the bird’s beautiful shape. I chose to incorporate the same shape into my collection. I also made the decision to collaborate with Danish glass artist NINA Nørgaard on one-of-a-kind glass vases and recreate some of my most iconic styles using her exquisite glass pearls. Of course I’ll miss the opportunity to debut the collection with a busy presentation, but I know we’ll do it again someday. We’re living in a different world now, a more fragile one, and we must accept and respect that.”
“As a British brand showing on the official Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule for the first time, the warm and excited response we’ve had from the local creative community means the world to us. We’ve always been inspired by Scandinavian style and managed to build some wonderful relationships with amazingly stylish women in Copenhagen. We are extremely excited to be presenting our SS21 collection in an entirely new way this season. We’ll miss the buzz that comes from pulling a show together, but managing to create a new collection at all during these unprecedented times is a massive accomplishment. We’ll be celebrating our fifth anniversary soon, and the pandemic has allowed us to step back and really question exactly why we launched Rixo. As a team, we listened, we talked and we thought long and hard about what we want the future of the brand to look like. Moving FORWARD, we want to ensure that the right product is delivering at the right time and is in sync with real-world seasons. This will ultimately help reduce waste – a huge issue within the fashion industry and one that we wanted to address.”
“We took Rotate in a different direction this season. Designing our SS21 collection in lockdown meant we were suddenly spending way more time at home and, like many people, we were looking for comfort from our closets; we wanted this sense of ease to be reflected in the collection. This season feels a lot more subtle; we’ve toned down the colors to create a softer mood. We have mixed emotions about how different fashion weeks will look this season. On the one hand, it will be exciting to see how creatively everyone has responded to this new challenge, but we will miss the traditional show format; it would just feel so inappropriate to jump straight back into that when the world has been so deeply affected by the virus, though. Usually, show day is a big party for us, but this year it’s going to be a more intimate celebration with our local Copenhagen community. The pandemic has forced us to think what is really at the core of Rotate, and how best to communicate it. Taking more time to reflect rather than just doing is something we will definitely take away from all this.”
“When Copenhagen Fashion Week announced its plans to move FORWARD with a hybrid format, the team and I chose to stick with a traditional presentation. It will be interesting to see how fashion weeks continue to evolve, and the digital aspect will probably become more and more important in the future, but for now it just felt right for us to create an event for our local community, who have supported us since the beginning. When it came to actually designing the SS21 collection, the biggest challenge was trying to grasp where the world was headed and creating something that felt right for that moment. Thankfully, I have an amazing team – they’ve helped me stay positive, creative and innovative over the past few months. I really wanted the collection to feel optimistic and playful. By the end of all this, I think what we need is to be set free again, and I wanted the collection to reflect that.”
“After our last show in January, we started talking about what we wanted to do for SS21 fashion week and were leaning towards a digital set-up. When the pandemic hit, we only became more certain that it was the right way to go. We will be able to reach more buyers and press this way, especially given the current travel restrictions. We’re very excited to see how the new hybrid fashion week plays out; there’s definitely a different vibe in the city right now, as no one knows what to expect. The pandemic also affected the design process this season, as we had to work from home – not easy when fabric choices and fittings are involved. Ultimately, though, we’ve continued to embrace style over trends – the pandemic has only proved that we are going in the right direction – and building a wardrobe of long-lasting investment pieces.”
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