Copenhagen Fashion Week S/S 2024: everything you need to know

Copenhagen Fashion Week’s summer edition is famed for its balmy catwalks and hazy-day runways. Not so this week, as sideways winds played tug-of-war with the umbrella-lined front row. Rain has not stopped play, however, as the capital’s busiest show schedule to date is pressing on despite the meteorological challenges.

Performance is proving popular: Ervin Latimer presented his eponymous show as his drag alter ego Anna Konda, Nicklas Skovgaard made his debut with artist Britt Liberg performing a one-woman show, and the Sunflower team, Ulrik Pedersen and Alan Blond, had Danish legends Laid Back strumming a set centre stage. Elsewhere, the summer collections are giving us a glimpse of what we’d be wearing if not seeking refuge under gabardine macs, with favourites The Garment, OperaSport, Stamm and Skall Studio delivering a gamut of sweet-to-street summer style. In every sense, the show is going on.

Here, in an ongoing round-up, we report on the best of Copenhagen Fashion Week S/S 2024.

The best of Copenhagen Fashion Week S/S 2024

Lattimier

Entitled ‘Position is Power’, Ervin Latimer’s eponymous show put the stock in stockings this season. Making a comment on the male archetypes of the New York Stock Exchange, he opened the show as his drag alter ego Anna Konda, pulling some power moves around the catwalk to Hey Big Spender. The collection that followed is best described as subversive corporate-core – but make it fabulous. Shirts were bonded with a cascade of Bic biros; suits were worn with back-to-front braces; trousers were tasselled as if they had got caught in the office shredder (in fact, they were made from company invoices), and T-shirts ready ’Money, powder, glory’. Backstage post-show, Lattimier said he wanted to present ’how this kind of attire can [not only] express one’s status, but the idea of what’s real and what’s not in that world’. Particularly clever were the open knits with zigzag intarsia reflecting the stock-market crash of 1998. ‘It’s the idea of the more you lose, the more exposed you become,’ he smiled.

Nicklas Skovgaard

Copenhagen fashion week show — Nicklas Skovgaard S/S 2024

If there was a prize for the most original debut fashion show, step forward Nicklas Skovgaard. The designer teamed with the Dutch performance artist and professional ballerina Britt Liberg to make his first impression a memorable one as she performed a one-woman catwalk show. Changing into each look one by one to the ripples of organ music, she posed to the audience as though we were a mirror in her salon. ’I was really dreaming of showing clothes in a new way and doing my take on the fashion show,’ Skovgaard told us backstage. ‘I wanted to show you the details within the clothes, like what happens when you put it on and take it off. Getting dressed is an intimate [thing], then being so powerful when you wear it.’ Surrounded by 16 mannequins wearing the rest of the collection, Liberg proved mesmerising as she confidently changed into 12 different outfits, each an ode to Victorian costumery realised using sustainable weaving techniques and presented through an alluring new lens. Both a provocative reinvention of the traditional fashion-show concept and a statement on the way women can use their clothes to feel the best version of themselves, it proved to be a playful-meet-cute debut for this Copenhagen-based talent. ’Because it’s my first show, you know, I think it should really be my meeting with the world just like I want it to be,’ he smiled backstage.

Sunflower

What’s more feel good than 1980s electronic pop duo legends Laid Back performing its 1983 hit White Horse in the middle of the Sunflower runway? Its S/S 2024 menswear collection. The eleventh collection from creative director and founder Ulrik Pedersen and Alan Blond, it fused the pair’s insistence on timeless wardrobe beauties that buck catwalk trends with a very timely sensibility. Beautiful wool tailoring worn with authentically-loved leather jackets and jeans with a vintage patina was the vibe here, worn with an attitude as easygoing as the pop maestros providing the soundtrack. Speaking after the show, Pedersen said it was about presenting the Sunflower signatures in a way that was elegant, ‘but not too grown up’. Like the entertainment, these are clothes that exude confidence but remain young at heart.

Stamm

While childhood photos taken on film can often get lost in boxes, Elisabet Stamm dug her own out for her S/S 2024 show. Emblazoned on jackets, anoraks and tracksuits, images of animals were printed and patchworked, leading to a collection that brought Stamm’s past into a very desirable present. ‘They’re really bad pictures from my childhood but I kind of felt like showing something that I felt connected to and that I felt joyful about and those were those memories,’ she shared backstage. ‘In an abstract way, even though they’re my personal memories, I hope that many people can [connect] to it.’ The sense of nostalgia rippled not only through motifs but materials. 90 per cent of the collection was crafted from deadstock fabrics or fabrics that I have used before. ‘That’s why I also work with digital prints because it adds a new layer to it,’ she explained. With a soundtrack devised by her friend, the French producer Princ€, and a live performance by Scandinavian-Syrian rapper Silvana Imam, the takeaway here was skilful spontaneity. ’I never follow any recipe, even when I cook,’ she smiled. ‘When I design, I follow my heart and the process is what I feel and what I come by.’

Henrik Vibskov

‘I want you to look. And feel. And want,’ purred MC Jahmarl Crick, aka KyleLondonnn, centre stage atop a plinth in the middle of a silk-chiffon-lined boxing ring. ‘Get into the fabrics, get into the prints, get into the colours.’ Conducting a slow-motion face-off between models in the ring, who were – in classic Henrik Vibskov form – less mannequins, more characters in a story, the performer held court as the collection played out. The idea came about, said Vibskov, as he and his team played around with the idea of boxes and how as children ‘we systemise and categorise’ things. Then the idea moved to boxing, ‘but not so much the violence but the mind games during the presentation,’ he explained. ‘I actually find that more interesting than the fighting.’ The clothes reflected the stimuli, with bonnets and bags in the shape of gloves; shoes with ankle straps with velcro fastening tabs; embossed leather separates bound with whipstitch, and robes crafted from exquisite brocade. Ever the pioneer of sustainable fashion (Vibskov was well ahead of the curve in the 1990s), all the fabric in the collection was either recycled or organic, with 83 per cent of garments comprising fabric certification. There was even one look that he showed in a previous collection here. ‘Why not?’ he smiled backstage. ‘It works.’ Clever move, as ever, from a designer renowned for thinking outside the box.

P.L.N.

Copenhagen Fashion Week P.L.N. show — P.L.N. S/S 2024

Presented on models whose features and frames were contorted with bandages and oversized mouthguards, Peter Lundvald Nielsen’s S/S 2024 collection was an intensely personal one for the Danish designer. It was, he said, a comment on the need to protect oneself, something he felt impassioned to do after a recent stint in LA. ‘I won’t name any names, but when I worked out [there] I saw the industry from a different side, so I wanted to work with a fighting spirit,’ he said. ‘We want to protect ourselves, especially in the world that we live in right now.’ It took shape with padded silhouettes referencing American football contradicted by a line of grunge-glamour dresses, a comment on extreme wealth yet conversely crafted from deadstock fabrics. The finale was a white leather wedding dress, a more commercial offering to counter the conceptualism, he said. ‘If we want to survive as a company, we also have to produce and show what we can do in the studio, because everything is so production[-based] today. And I feel like that’s really a shame. Because I love what I do. And I love working with my hands. But there’s no money in it.’

Paolina Russo

As winners of sponsor Zalando’s Visionary Award, the London-based Paolina Russo team headed to Copenhagen for its S/S 2024 show – a journey of discovery that was mirrored in this collection. Entitled ‘Monolithics’, it followed the path of a ‘warrior heroine’ on her travels through life and the mark she leaves behind her. The theme was realised in prints that were inspired by the pastel chalk pavement drawings of founders and CSM alumni Alex Russo and Lucile Guilmard and the cave inkings that predated them centuries beforehand. ‘As people, we’ve created the same symbols for thousands and thousands of years,’ said Russo backstage. ‘This language that they left on the walls is the reason why today we understand where we come from,’ added Guilard. Here, they were laser-etched onto the degradé denim, boleros and mini-skirts, a technique masterminded by their Portuguese collaborator Pizarro to reduce water wastage. Elsewhere, knitwear came in cotton using a weaving process that gave the prints a lenticular effect – fabric innovation becoming a key signature for this popular LVMH-prize nominated brand that everyone agrees is going places.

Stay tuned for more from Copenhagen Fashion Week S/S 2024.

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