Copenhagen felt even more like a fairytale city than usual on the final day of Copenhagen Fashion Week. Within a span of a few hours attendees were introduced to Icelandic Huldufólk at Ranra and a Toadstool Queen and papier-mache friends including a giant snail and a colorful beetle at Emilie Helmstedt’s show.
Each season this artist/designer creates a universe for her collection that reads like a children’s book; sometimes the clothes have veered towards the juvenile too. Having created her own kids’ offering seems to have allowed Helmstedt to create a more mature, yet still playful, ready-to-wear collection. Mushroom embroideries on a camp shirt and shorts of linen, a fabric with a firmer hand, were convincing. And as this season’s nature motif was simpler than usual, with more fields of solid color, the intarsia knits felt more refined.
As Helmstedt has been so successful at creating her own imaginative worlds, it’s been difficult in the past to relate what she was doing industry-wide trends, but for spring she took the plunge with a selection of slip dresses. “The trend right now is super ’90s and G-strings and we are not about that,” she explained, ‘but [we] just tried to tap in a bit into that mood. I think it’s fun.” So do we.
