The Time We Wear
Four designers, four different ideas of what makes clothes worth wearing. A closer look at Copenhagen Fashion Week SS27.
Four labels, four different ideas of what makes clothes worth wearing.
Copenhagen Fashion Week / Spring Summer 2027
In Copenhagen's King's Garden, a model walks between two rows of spectators in a softly gathered grey top and a pale skirt. The setting is grand, with stone columns and sculpture behind her. The clothes seem more interested in the street outside. It is a useful reminder that a runway is only one place a garment will ever go.
At Copenhagen Fashion Week in August 2026, four collections made us think less about what is new than about what happens next. The walk home after a rehearsal. A summer afternoon spent outdoors. An ordinary pair of jeans worn with something unexpected. A piece of clothing that might make sense to a daughter and her mother.
The designers do not share a single aesthetic. That is precisely why they are interesting together.
Baum und Pferdgarten: After the performance
Rikke Baumgarten and Helle Hestehave founded Baum und Pferdgarten in Copenhagen in 1999. Their collections have long combined the discipline of tailoring with a willingness to disrupt it. For Spring/Summer 2027, they gave that tension a setting: the moments after a ballet rehearsal, when the dancer leaves the studio and carries a little of its ritual into the day.
The clothes are less literal than that description suggests. In one look, a navy jacket and long trousers are interrupted by a glimpse of pale lilac at the waist. Elsewhere, a grey top gathers above a light skirt, with a white layer escaping beneath it. A black sleeveless look brings texture and movement to the lower half of the silhouette. None of these pieces needs an actual dance studio to make sense.
The designers use bows, lace and other dancewear references across the wider collection, but the strongest idea is the contrast between control and looseness. It can be as small as a jacket that refuses to sit quite as expected. The clothes are dressed up without seeming reserved for a special occasion.
The show took place in King's Garden. In those wide photographs, the audience and the architecture are part of the scene. Yet the looks that remain with us are the ones we can imagine wearing after the audience has gone.
Skall Studio: A summer with room to breathe
For sisters Julie and Marie Skall, who founded Skall Studio in 2014, Spring/Summer 2027 took the name La Piscine. The collection references both the 1969 French film and the museum of the same name in Roubaix. The runway, however, was in a Copenhagen garden, surrounded by grass and trees rather than a swimming pool.
The photographs have the unhurried quality of an afternoon that belongs to nobody's schedule. A cream top and loose white trousers are worn with a straw hat and a basket. A pale pink layer sits over blue denim. A generously cut jacket and easy trousers make a case for tailoring that leaves the body some space.
The accessories carry histories of their own. According to the brand's show notes, the baskets were drawn from the private archive of basket maker Steen Hedegaard Madsen, while the straw hats came from the sisters' vintage collection. Instead of making everything look newly acquired, the styling suggests the pleasure of adding something to a wardrobe that already exists.
Skall Studio speaks openly about its preference for natural and single-fibre materials, and offers a repair service. Those practices do not tell us the full environmental story of any one look. They do, however, point to an idea that feels relevant here: what we wear ought to be worth looking after.
Studio Constance: The freedom to change shape
Studio Constance approaches everyday clothes from another direction. The Stockholm label, led by Rebecca Dovenryd Almberg and introduced to the CPHFW NEWTALENT programme for SS27, presented a collection called Light Ascending. In the brand's own account, it reflects a period of personal change.
There is drama in the work, certainly. The sculptural brown dress in the selected photographs is built around volume and an almost theatrical outline. But look at what sits beside it. A long black top falls over loose blue jeans. A short dark jacket is worn over fluid white layers. Familiar wardrobe pieces are given different proportions, and with them, different attitudes.
That contrast is more convincing than a declaration that everything is 'wearable'. Not every piece has to be. A young label should have the freedom to experiment, while letting that experimentation travel into simpler garments. Here it appears in the length of a top, the weight of a hem, or the way a jacket changes the line of a dress.
The result is not a prescribed image of how a woman should look. It leaves some room for how she feels like looking today.
Freya Dalsjø: A wardrobe between generations
Freya Dalsjø's presentation was quieter in scale. Held at Etage Projects in Copenhagen for an audience of sixty, it brought the focus close to the clothes themselves. The designer describes making each piece with her mother and looking back at garments her mother wore at the same age, many of which she still wears today.
It is an unusually concrete starting point for a collection about longevity. Rather than imagining an abstract future customer, Dalsjø begins with two people at different points in their lives, asking whether they could both want the same garment.
The selected looks make the question feel practical. A long black sleeveless layer frames a white shirt. A fluid charcoal blouse falls into wide dark trousers. A pale stone-coloured ensemble has enough ease to be worn in more than one way. There is little distraction from cut, proportion and the way fabric hangs.
For SS27, the studio concentrated on woven textiles, exploring materials including cashmere, wool, cotton and silk. The collection also includes laborious hand-built pieces, but its quieter looks make the same argument: a garment can be considered without announcing how much work went into it.
Dalsjø does not offer a formula for timeless clothes. She offers something more personal: the possibility that a piece might remain useful, and loved, as the person wearing it changes.
What remains after the runway
These four collections do not add up to a single Copenhagen uniform. Baum und Pferdgarten makes room for play within a structured wardrobe. Skall Studio lets daily life and memory into the picture. Studio Constance tests the limits of familiar shapes. Freya Dalsjø asks what a garment might mean across time.
What connects them is not a colour, a silhouette or a trend. It is the thought of someone actually wearing the clothes. After the show, after the photographs, on days that will never be documented.
That is where a wardrobe becomes personal.
Photography: James Cochrane / Copenhagen Fashion Week SS27.
