Trends from Copenhagen Fashion Week SS20

Stockholm fashion week SS20 was cancelled this season because “the fashion industry needs new sustainable business models and formats that can generate new revenue models” according to a press release last month from the Swedish Fashion Council. The president of the council goes on to state that “Fashion Week, like the fashion industry as a whole, faces major challenges in meeting the demands for sustainability, innovation, relevance and timing that are set today.”

We are of the opinion that the voracious growth of multinational fast fashion has pushed the smaller and mid-range brands (who have a better shot at actually producing sustainably) to the make-it-or-break it edges of the industry and that affects fashion week, a crucible for the development of talent. But we will save our rant for another time.

In the meantime, we’ve had to live vicariously through our Danish cousins at Copenhagen Fashion Week. Our brilliant itinerant photographer Emma Grann was on site to lens the trends and micro-trends that will be influencing this side of the world next spring.

Big risks makes for shaky business in uncertain times so we haven’t seen anything shockingly new in the Spring Summer 2020 collections. Rather more a continuation of good, wearable designs that continue a solid Danish design tradition with just a soupçon of drama here and there to make things lagom interesting.

The Danes have never been as shy with color as the Swedes and we noticed that the fashion crowd continues to delight in color (yay!) and that sneakers have now fully taken over (we’re still shoe girls). We are major fans of recycling so it was interesting to see trends from the last few seasons follow through to spring, such as the babushka headscarf popularized by ASAP Rocky…long before his Swedish summer in jail stint. We have finished our rants on that one.

Just seeing Debra Shaw on the runway again warmed our hearts!