Copenhagen Fashion Week AW21 highlights

It’s a city known for its colourful, creative approach to clothes, and this week Copenhagen’s biannual fashion week delivered fun, free-spirited fashion in full force.

While thanks to the online-only format sightings of the Danish capital’s famously snappily dressed street style set have been notably lacking, the designers themselves rose to the challenge of presenting their autumn/ winter 21 collections digitally, with a schedule of beautiful fashion films and audience-free runway shows. 

Joining the lineup for the first time on Tuesday was high street heavyweight H&M, with the fashion week debut of its premium Studio collection. Designed at the retailer’s Stockholm atelier, the limited edition spring/ summer 21 offering, which will hit stores February 18, was inspired by adventure and treasure-seeking explorers, with octopus-like tasselled skirts, over-the-knee leather boots and pirate hats providing Jack Sparrow references aplenty.    

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Elsewhere, practicality and colour were overarching themes. Baum und Pferdgarten and Gestuz offered an array of park-perfect puffers, while coat specialists Stand Studio upped the ante with a series of coats, bags and hats in matching highlighter hues. 

Leather trousers were ubiquitous. At Nynne they came wide-legged and floor-puddling, at Copenhagen label Samsoe Samsoe they were cropped and olive green worn with an argyle knit, yellow socks and chunky black loafers and at Gestuz models walked the audience-free runway in an array of leather-y chocolate brown silhouettes.

Buttercup yellow dresses also blossomed as an optimistic spring staple. London label Rixo, who also enlisted three influencers to home-shoot its collection, offered two silky nightie-like versions, while Samsoe Samsoe paired summery yellow chiffon slips with chunky tweed blazers. 

Among all the low-key lockdown-appropriate gear, Stine Goya’s collection was an undoubted highlight. Called Grunge Euphoria and inspired by 1980s New Romanticism and the neo-noir glamour of the roaring 1920s, it burst with floral prints in a retina-searing colour palette, hand-drawn checks and sequins. A top-to-toe lilac silk ensemble with matching beret was particularly joyous.  

The Copenhagen-based brand, which cast beat poet and rapper Yoyo Bonya, Ballerina Kara H and marine conservationist Hanli Prinsloo in its AW21 film shot in Cape Town, was one of a handful of home-grown labels to swap models for ‘real’ women. Up-and-coming brand Nynne chose to feature nine exceptional Copenhagen women – among them a female comedian, a data analytics architect and 87-year-old model Eva Hougaard Lauridsen, while Baum und Pferdgarten enlisted 21 brand supporters from around the globe, each of whom captured their look in their home town. “We wanted this to be a joyful reminder that we are still connected,” said the brand’s founders.  

Copenhagen Fashion Week finishes this evening with digital shows from Holzweiler, Ganni and Rotate.  Watch at copenhagenfashionweek.com.