A. Roege Hove 

The S/S24 season of Copenhagen Fashion Week kicked off with this year’s Woolmark Karl Lagerfeld Prize for Innovation winner A. Roege Hove. Set in the gardens of the Designmuseum Danmark, the collection was inspired by the “allure of summer” – but hopefully a very Danish summer, as the skies opened up just as the show kicked off.

Despite the rain, Roege Hove’s collection so neatly showed how she continues to push knitwear to elegant, technical extremes (which can, thankfully, withstand wet weather). The show opened with a delicate sheer top within which 200 silver Georg Jensen beads were trapped – a soft launch of the designer’s upcoming collaboration with the iconic Danish design house. Later in the collection, the designer introduced Circulose, a material made from 100% textile waste, padding it into “clouds” within a top, skirt, and dress. Although the designer continues to stick to familiar silhouettes, this season proves that there’s no limit to her innovation and creativity in terms of textiles and technique.

Saks Potts 

For their SS24 show, Saks Potts founder-designers Barbara Potts and Cathrine Saks invited guests to the seaside of Charlottenlund, a childhood-favourite summer spot just outside Copenhagen which was also the inspiration for their latest collection. 

Community is, in many ways, the fabric of the brand’s enduring success: the show was opened by Hadid sister Alana, followed down the 200m-long sea-sprayed catwalk by a crew of both the designer’s friends and professional models. The show also introduced a new collaboration, to be released in November, with family-owned Italian heritage brand Oscalito – again, the Saks Potts family grows.  

The collection’s standouts were looks in oceanic blues and soft silvers, brought together by the designers’ unrivalled knack for mixing and matching garments to create unusual, yet striking, silhouettes. The show also featured classics from the label’s ‘uniform’ line—an encouragement for buyers to hold on to their pieces season after season (and a testament to the high quality of their clothes, which are able to stand the test of time.)

Paolina Russo

Zalando Visionary Award winner Paolina Russo’s debut runway show was by far the most hotly anticipated of the week – and it lived up to all expectations of magic. Entitled Monolithics, the show was a “contemplation of the passage of time and the marks that the brand’s warrior heroine’s protagonist has left on the world on her pilgrimage through it.” 

Set to a soundtrack of “flute trills and birdsong with cloud rap and ethereal, new-age trance”, the collection, which featured the duo’s signature prismatic knits in wrapped folkish silhouettes alongside new airbrushed and laser-etched denim, established a spirited mythos for a future generation. Elsewhere in the collection, ancient folkloric symbols emblazoned on soft candy-hued lycra and jersey separates perfectly embodied Paolina Russo’s ethos: “the recontextualisation and celebration of yesterday’s craft practices to articulate an aesthetic anchored in tomorrow.” 

Henrik Vibskov 

Henrik Vibskov is a veteran of the Danish fashion scene but his S/S24 show, entitled The Unboxing Waltz Tutorial, proved that the designer-artist-musician is still as fresh in his creative vision as ever. Despite its title, the collection was so much more than the drab social media trend of unwrapping gifts for a virtual audience. Boxes, for Vibskov, were considered as protection, as a contained journey, and as a psychological reflex to make sense of our world. 

Standard bearers wearing deconstructed boxing gloves as headwear, lowered and lifted circular orange flags over Vib’s models as they took their place on one of four podiums dotted about a courtyard of the Designmuseum. They then entered a ‘boxing ring’ where they ‘waltzed’ before Ringmaster MC Jahmarl Crick, aka KyleLondonn. 

Despite the quirky performance, the clothes were still the attention-winner, with exquisite bird-motif knits (as well some that read ‘in transit’ or ‘out for delivery’) and checked tailoring and outerwear.

Ganni 

Last – but most certainly not least – on the S/S24 schedule was the darling child of Danish fashion, Ganni. A pioneer of innovation in the realms of sustainability, Ganni’s latest collection beautifully considered the possibility of working alongside AI. It’s a refreshing stance in a world that has been conditioned to cower any time the technology is mentioned in the media. Although giant AI-animated native trees – created in collaboration with Danish tech-artist Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm – ‘spoke’ to each other and with guests, the technology didn’t infiltrate the show in any other way – perhaps a (very welcomed) offering of optimism from Ganni’s creative director Ditte Reffstrup that traditional craftsmanship can remain manual and human-centric. 

If the show’s AI-generated soundtrack was a throwback to the carefree vibes of the 2010s when social media and other technological scaries were just a distant dream, the styling of the collection marked a clear maturing of the Ganni girl beyond the party dresses for which it has become known. Exquisite tailoring and artful layering were the real showstoppers in this collection.