Almost a month ago, fashion heads assembled in the Danish capital for what is known as the greenest fashion event in the world, where designers drum to the beat of sustainability.
With four days of shows, dinners and events, Copenhagen once again proved its effortless cool as the style-savvy took to the streets with their crafted layering, polka dots, oversized bags, and the street-style staple: flip-flops.
On the runway, it was a week of comebacks, pretty feet, and buzzworthy debuts. Here are seven things Scandinavian fashion is trying to tell us:
1. Re-coding the ordinary icon
OpéraSPORT played host to the Havaianas x Zellerfeld collaboration, putting the crowd in a Croc-inspired chokehold. The 3D-printed flip-flop one-upped the ordinary with its innovative blend of tech and design that will have people staring at your feet even more. Pretty feet continued in the Cecilie Bahnsen x ASICS collection. After ten years out of the Motherland, Bahnsen’s return reminded everyone of what lives in the sacred Scandinavian DNA: if you can’t bike in it, I don’t want it.
2. Deadstock, alive again
The Stockholm-based upcycling brand Rave Review (RVW) made its Copenhagen debut with Blommornas Makt (Power of Flowers) and reminded us of all the material intricacies that come with garment design. While many brands talk sustainability, founders Josephine Bergqvist and Livia Schück embody it. Here’s to a better future made from forgotten leftovers.
3. Ancestry as blueprint
The winner of the 2025 Zalando Visionary Award, IAMISIGO, was nothing short of a spiritual journey. The spring/summer ’26 Dual Mandate collection wove ancestral materials like raffia, sisal and metals into wearable, ceremonial design sourced from Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
As designer Bubu Ogisi expressed in an interview with Vogue: ”It’s about preserving ancestral technologies, resisting extractive production models and honouring craft as a living archive.”
4. Excess is power
After an eight year break, she’s not only returned under the NewTalent banner, she’s returned with rat bags and her name is Anne Sofie Madsen. The collaboration with Esben Weile Kjær sharpened her ethos of transformation, renewal and fluid identity, with the rat – lifted from Sofia Coppola’s short film Lick the Star – becoming a symbol of girlhood’s codes of power, betrayal and becoming.
Rejecting the minimalist codes she grew up with in Scandinavian fashion, Madsen and designer friend Caroline Clante recast ‘bad taste’ and girlish excess as radical, desirable and defiantly cool.
Fashion talks
Off the runway, Copenhagen Fashion Week hosted a series of talks in collaboration with Vogue Business and Zalando, bringing together designers, activists and strategists. The conversations placed fashion in a wider frame of culture, community and responsibility.
Three themes stood out.
5. Inclusion as design
At The Future of Inclusive Design and the Vogue Business x CPHFW: Size Inclusivity Report, speakers framed adaptive fashion as nothing short of a design revolution.
- Lauren Wasser, model and activist, underlined that adaptive fashion restores dignity by embedding accessibility into everyday clothes, not isolating them into ”special” sections.
- Emma Mattel, casting director, spoke of inclusivity as empathy in practice, designing for everyone by imagining yourself in another person’s shoes.
- Meanwhile, the Vogue Business panel called out performative diversity, noting how restrictive sample sizing (34–36) continues to exclude the majority of wearers.
6. Craft and culture as currency
At the Craft is Key and Cultures of Fashion sessions, speakers reminded the industry that true value lies in heritage and community, not just logos.
- Panellists stressed that craft forms the backbone of circularity, repair and ecological responsibility. As Indré Rockefeller, founder of the non-profit The Circularity Project, explained: ”Design plays an outsized role. Eighty to ninety per cent of a garment’s environmental footprint is determined at the design stage.”
- Others underlined that value also lies in telling the story of making and acknowledging the hands and heritage behind garments rather than relying on logos.
- At Cultures of Fashion, speakers highlighted how streetwear’s credibility comes from genuine community roots and its cross-pollination with music and art. To stay credible, brands need to nurture relationships with creative communities rather than simply extract their aesthetics.
7. Fashion as dialogue
Across several talks, fashion was reframed as a cultural ecosystem built on exchange between brands, consumers and artists.
- Kay Muwoke, senior D&I manager at Zalando, stressed the need for collaboration across design, craft and sustainability to build transparency and trust.
- Speakers agreed that fashion’s future depends less on spectacle and more on dialogue, authenticity and long-term value.
These insights were drawn from the Copenhagen Fashion Week Talks: The Future of Inclusive Design, Cultures of Fashion, Craft is Key, and Vogue Business x CPHFW: Size Inclusivity Report
Four days, countless layers, and more flip-flops than one could count, the season made its mark. Make the ordinary iconic, revive deadstock, honour ancestry, celebrate excess, and recognise that the push for inclusion is far from over.
