“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes,” is a popular adage in Scandinavia where the nature of the climate has always had an effect on what people wear. Nordic knits—which were revived by a number of brands (including Rolf Ekroth and Paolina Russo) for fall 2024 at Copenhagen Fashion Week—are a good example of how functionality had been combined with aesthetics, not to mention craft. Hearty fabrics of the type you might find in your grandfather’s closet, such as tweeds and houndstooths, also keep out the cold, and they were cut into classic, dependable cover-ups at Caro Editions and Skall Studio this season. Building on the region’s famed connection to nature, dyes, prints, and other techniques were used to conjure Mother Nature’s glory. (See the bark-like jacquard at Henrik Vibskov and Solitude Studios’ bogcore collection.)
The CPHFW market is a contemporary (versus luxury) one, and jeans are a key staple. Marimekko, currently celebrating the 60th anniversary of its famous Unikko poppy print, put it on denim, and Vain, which is also from Finland, showed a pair of double chap-like jeans cut in its signature heart motif. At Stamm, jeans in XXL proportions took on sculptural aspects. Elsewhere corduroy made a comeback.
Less laidback were cinched waists and scarves and stoles that wrapped around the neck and shoulder. In contrast to these circular motifs, the flat look that was seen at the Marc Jacobs show was present in a few Danish collections. More pervasive was ’80s nostalgia, which was particularly strong (in eveningwear) at Nicklas Skovgaard and Mfpen’s not-quite-business-as-usual pinstripes and ties. This seems to speak to the push-and-pull between work and leisure, the casual and the polished that is currently defining the post-pandemic landscape. The shows in Denmark offered a wide range of real-world options and a smattering of extraordinary looks, for duckling-turned-swan transformations—duckling, as in bird, rather than those of Truman Capote’s ilk. The swan, after all, is the national bird of this fairy-tale kingdom.
