For Cecilie Bahnsen, there’s something ineffably wonderful about the imperfect and the fleeting.
Take flowers, which are perfect at full bloom but that also marks the beginning of their decay — or a fashion show with a live performance.
“You can’t control it, it will evolve and everybody who’s here will come up with their interpretation, their feeling of it, and then hopefully will grow and become something else as well,” she said backstage of her concept.
Hence why she called on musician Yuki Tsujii to perform and why a work drawn from Danish artist Tal R’s “Untitled Flowers” series was printed on silver paper and plastered around her show venue, crinkling the more guests moved around.
Concept aside, with the brand’s 10-year anniversary nearing, a dive into its archives also had Bahnsen reconsidering its DNA, which isn’t just filmy dresses but also layering and, more recently, a sense of soft utility with a strong Scandinavian no-nonsense approach.
What the season boiled down to in her opinion was “really how clothes were working to the body,” she said.
Case in point: vests inspired by utilitywear with their lacing and adjustable panels. “It goes with your movement,” Bahnsen pointed out. “It allows you to be you.”
Between handsome examples of her flattering floaty dresses, miniskirts that were “shorter than ever and poofier than ever,” as she put it, and plenty of outerwear, a category that is growing every year, it amounted to one of her strongest collections yet.
Before the show, Bahnsen hoped that she would be able to telegraph her love for process to the audience so that her work could “not just live in [her] head but hopefully so many other places.”
Given the beautiful utility she offered up, it’ll certainly find plenty of wardrobes around the world to move into.
