At Copenhagen Fashion Week, Scandi Style Comes Into Focus

There’s a reason the fashion world keeps returning to Copenhagen. Beyond the street style and the It girls, the city has become a barometer for how we want to dress.

For spring/summer 2027, Copenhagen Fashion Week felt less concerned with dialing things up than with sharpening its perspective. While some designers—Paolina Russo among them—embraced a louder proposition, the season’s defining shift was subtler: Archetypal Scandinavian minimalism was omnipresent, but it also made room for a broader range of sensibilities and clothes with a clearer point of view.

The shows, which ran from August 3 to 6, marked the second half of CPHFW’s 20th anniversary celebration, which kicked off last season in January. Heavy hitters like OpéraSport, Marimekko, and Baum und Pferdgarten returned to the calendar alongside debutants like Collina Strada and Institution by Galib Gassanoff.

Gassanoff, whose brand is based in Milan, presented one of the week’s strongest collections on Wednesday morning at the Danish National Gallery. Gone were the repurposed rug skirts of previous seasons—though they resurfaced beneath the models’ feet as the runway carpet. In their place came impeccably cut trench coats cinched at the waist and languid, floor-skimming cotton dresses rendered in Fortuny-like pleats that traced the body.

The collection was a study in contrasts. Beginning with the craft traditions of his native Georgia and using wool yarns sourced and spun there, Gassanoff filtered those references through familiar wardrobe archetypes: a blazer twisted backward with shoulders pushed to near caricature, or a going-out top fashioned from tetri—the Georgian fractional currency introduced after the country’s independence from the Soviet Union—which stood in for sequins, its openwork recalling medieval chain mail.

“When something is in a museum, it has a certain value,” Gassanoff said backstage of his decision to show in a gallery setting. “But when it’s in the wardrobe, it becomes a piece a clothing and we undervalue all that work. [Showing here] is a way to showcase and elevate craftsmanship.”

Throughout the week, one question lingered: What is Danish style now? Ease was a recurring answer, nowhere more convincingly expressed than at By Malene Birger, where relaxed Scandinavian dressing was elevated with tassel-trimmed funnel-neck jackets and fluid peplum tops cinched with cummerbund waistbands.

Presented at creative director Emilie Martinsen-Kønigsfeld’s family home—a sprawling estate north of the city—the show marked the label’s first official return to the Copenhagen Fashion Week calendar in more than six years.

“When selecting the venue, it was important that the show felt like a homecoming, both to Denmark and Copenhagen Fashion Week, but also to the heritage of the brand itself. Friheden was the obvious choice,” Martinsen-Kønigsfeld said post-show. In a full-circle homecoming, model and Denmark native Mona Tougaard, who last walked for a Danish brand in 2023, closed the show in a liquid-shine slip dress with a cutout neckline representing how the sun shifts with the light.

Earlier in the day, Skall Studio’s Julie and Marie Skall asserted that minimalism still had room for romance. Cottagecore sundresses in butter yellow and striped poplin were styled with vintage woven baskets, a nod to Jane Birkin’s signature wicker carryall. (Titled “La Piscine,” the collection nodded to Jacques Deray’s 1969 film of the same name, in which Birkin appeared alongside Alain Delon and Romy Schneider.)

Wearability has always been central to Danish style. Herskind’s mother-daughter duo Birgitte Herskind and Andrea Hess softened sharp tailoring with tactile flourishes, like a feathery brooch pinned to the lapel of a suiting jacket. At MKDT Studio, meanwhile, familiar wardrobe staples were reimagined through subtle refinements.

That’s not to say Scandinavian style is without its eccentricities. At Studio Constance, topsy-turvy pannier dresses were made even more off-kilter with Havaianas kitten heels—a silhouette that feels destined for Scandinavian wardrobes, given how ubiquitous the brand’s cherry-red toe-splitters were throughout the week.

On the final evening, Nikolas Skovgaard and Collina Strada—the inaugural designer in CPHFW’s International Guest Slot—sent the week out on a high. Skovgaard staged fashion as theater, with models arriving three abreast in vintage cars before stepping onto the runway. The girl-group glamour of the 1960s, the Shangri-Las and the Supremes chief among its references, was refracted through Skovgaard’s singular point of view, emerging in two-tone gingham babydoll dresses and oversize coin purses worn deliberately open.

“It’s a very feminine girl, but there’s an edge to her, too,” Skovgaard said backstage, surrounded by the models he affectionately referred to as his “Skovgaardettes.” “She’ll wear leather, but it has a gingham overlay. The silhouettes are very fluid, but there’s a lot of structure to them. It’s all about that contrast.”

The jam-packed schedule culminated with Caro Editions—a favorite among the city’s cool girls for its joyful, ’80s-inflected aesthetic—which perhaps offered the clearest expression of what Copenhagen Fashion Week has come to represent two decades on. For the finale, models walked arm in arm, a fitting reminder that, here, fashion is as much about community as it is about clothes.