4 posts tagged "Wood Wood"
Copenhagen Fashion Week Comes to a Close
Copenhagen fashion week kicked off Thursday, and below Blame It On Fashion blogger Marie Hindkær Wolthers reports back on the city’s most notable shows. To view our complete coverage, click here.
DAY 2:
Even with the promise of champagne, 8 a.m. is an early call time for the last day of fashion week. But that didn’t stop editors from flocking to Day Birger et Mikkelsen‘s Copenhagen flagship for an early-morning presentation. While show-goers enjoyed a tasty brunch, models wove through the room in tweed coats, wrap dresses, pencil skirts, fluffy sweaters and tiger-print pants. Casual suits and beaded jackets were also Fall features and showed off the brand’s signature fusion of intricate craftsmanship and simplicity.
After more than thirty years on the fashion scene, Ivan Grundahl is not exactly a new kid on the block. Even so, his Fall ’13 felt youthful, and even a little rock ’n’ roll. Asymmetrical lines, architectural shapes, and uneven silhouettes are Grundahl’s signatures—all of which were present during Friday’s show. The collection (above) offered lots of heavy boots, loose trousers, and sweaters in dark prints, black, and army green. Large pockets and lace were used as accents, and balloon-shaped dresses and sequined skirts provided hints of femininity.
Stine Riis, the winner of last year’s H&M Design Award, closed out Copenhagen fashion week with her collection, RIIS. For Fall ’13, she continued her love affair with clean dressing and discreet details, showing tailored trousers and narrow pencil skirts mixed with silk shirts and wool outerwear. A gray jacket was one of the best pieces in the show, and cutout patent leather details on skirts and tops were a nice contrast to the modern minimalism.
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Pretty With A Punch In Copenhagen
Pink, mint, pumpkin, lemon, and mauve were the dominant colors at Copenhagen fashion week, but the underlying ethos was far from frivolous. Established illustrator and Denmark’s rising local design star Anne Sofie Madsen’s signature illustration on both her invite and a silk T-shirt (pictured) in her Spring 2013 collection sums up the Danish spirit. With a mixture of sweetness and bite, a girl’s face hovers over an ice cream cone. Her features are flanked by pitbulls and cobras as she is surrounded by a wash of pink with mint green and gold drips.
While Madsen is the right person to push Copenhagen’s spirit to artistic extremes, the same mixture of hard-core style with a candy-colored palette was everywhere during the week. Only Wood Wood took a decidedly darker turn from its previous British public school-inspired seasons, with a collection evoking Liverpudlian hooligans with plum tracksuits, scowls, and full blue Scouse brows. Overall, the catwalks were awash with sugary shades and earthy or edgy shapes.
The likely originator of this trend is Stine Goya, whose season after season success promoting a dessert-inspired pistachio, pumpkin, and berry palette now helps define the present moment in Danish design. Goya’s soft, pragmatic cuts counterbalance her smart and serious references. In past seasons, she channeled the Amish, haunted puppet theaters, and Victoriana. This season, she presented an elegant, relaxed white blouse paired with matching seventies-style trousers, both sporting a watercolor print of clowns from a Fellini film. Although Goya makes challenging artistic references and was introduced to Denmark’s fashion scene through her relationship with surrealist Henrik Visbov, her clothes are Copenhagen’s most realistic additions to real women’s lives.
This accessible mentality was also evident at Bruuns Bazaar, where Rebekka Bay, the former artistic director for Cos, presented clean, crisp clothes for women and men, with exciting dashes of yellow and blue against sage, mint, vanilla, and taupe. Peter Jensen’s menswear and womenswear employed brighter and bolder versions of the same ice cream colors. Even the reliably gothic Barbara í Gongini started her artful show of sculptural stiff pleats and Rick Owens-like ravished leather with a series of ghostly girls wearing only acid yellow shredded tights, dresses, and tops in thin cotton. With its harder forms and spectrum of dessert shades, Copenhagen was a treat.
Before New York, A Copenhagen Jaunt
The calendar of global fashion weeks has already whipped cognoscenti around the world this year, and it’s barely February. This week, New York hosts its packed schedule of Fall shows; last week, it was Copenhagen’s turn on the world fashion stage.
Copenhagen fashion week energizes the whole city. Massive television screens beam the shows to the general public, who gather for impromptu parties on the street. Other fashion weeks have struggled to absorb trends from the axis-of-influence cities, but Copenhagen stays true to its own traditions, largely centered around loose, layers and bold prints. It’s a look done best by Henrik Vibskov, who helped define Danish design, but he’s got plenty of compatriots with collections worth seeing.
Stine Goya’s uncanny collection of graceful jumpsuits, rounded-shouldered jackets, raspberry-colored prairie-girl hats and softly draped dresses at the inspiring wood-paneled Danish Royal Danish Academy of Music was a standout (above left). So was the show from the talented Wackerhaus label, which looked like a sexed-up version of Goya’s slinkier pieces. The youthful, streetwear-leaning line Wood Wood stayed true to form with a collection of multi-layered print unisex coats, dresses and leggings in soft prints and muted shades of yellow, gray and maroon. Danish design is sometimes faulted for being overly theatrical, but any of these pieces off the runway could be easily assimilated into an everyday wardrobe. Not so those shown at Vilsbøl de Arce’s tiny presentation: lacerated leather masks, leather and wood laced boots and sculptural dresses and bodysuits (above right). They didn’t make a case for wearability, but you could easily see why the label often supplies Rihanna and Lady Gaga.
The Weather (And Fashion) Report From Copenhagen
When Helena Christensen says go, you go—even, as it turns out, if it happens to be pouring rain. That’s how it went at the so-called “World’s Greatest Catwalk” that closed out Copenhagen fashion week on Saturday. Organizers laid down literally a mile of pink carpet in the city center, and Helena Christensen issued the sendoff to the more than 200 catwalkers, from infants (cradled in mom’s arms) to Denmark’s leading elderly model, all of whom hoofed it through town in looks put together by local merchants.
Rain, as it turned out, was one of the week’s overriding themes. A storm raged during Stine Goya’s show, where models glided through rooms decorated with Victorian-style installations of antique furniture and massive floral arrangements. At Wood Wood (above), the designers actually hosed down their models before sending them into the spotlight at the Den Frie contemporary art museum; with army jackets, shirtdresses, and khakis clinging to their bodies underneath backpacks, they looked like kids caught in a thunderstorm on the way home from school. On the other hand, mother nature luckily held the rain from Henrik Vibskov’s outdoor show at a park known locally as a hook-up spot (despite the swim goggles Vibskov accessorized his looks with, and the two enormous wood boats that burly men pushed into the center of the catwalk for the finale).
But rain or no rain, Copenhagen is about fun more than overly serious, capital-F fashion. Although one of the country’s most established names in womenswear, Margit Bradt (below), showed a strong collection playing on a safari theme (one picked up by several other designers as well), Soulland designer Silas Adler freely admitted that much of the best Danish style is “too basic to put on a catwalk” in Milan or Paris. (Though Adler, whose label grew out of a modest T-shirt project he started with skater friends, did throw some suits into the mix for the first time, below.) The real action in Denmark is at street-level, without the pomp and circumstance that can attend other European fashion weeks. Take Soulland’s after-party, which went down, sans formal invites, at a dive bar called Andy’s—one that the owner had to be roused from a stupor to open that night. Continue Reading “The Weather (And Fashion) Report From Copenhagen” »