To mark a decade of dreamy silhouettes, cloud-like volumes and bow-trimmed brilliance, Cecilie Bahnsen returned to Copenhagen with a celebratory anniversary show – complete with archive mashups, bursts of silver, and a front row full of frothy fanfare
Few Danish designers have a universe as fully realised as Cecilie Bahnsen. The volume, the lightness, the bows both big and small – when you see a Cecilie Bahnsen dress coming (oft worn by an effortlessly cool girl, who’s paired it with ballet flats or sneakers, her hair loose and makeup barely there), you know it. Over the past decade, Bahnsen has built a bona fide design house in the heart of Copenhagen, merging couture-level craft with a down-to-earth Danish attitude and developed a fervent cult following along the way. There was only one way to mark this milestone: an anniversary show in her hometown. And so, yesterday, on a concrete-heavy industrial outdoor space (a great juxtaposition to the pretty frocks) Bahnsen staged a birthday show and all of her most fashionable friends came to celebrate.
“I really miss being able to do the outdoor shows and the whole relaxed feeling and people arriving on their bikes in the dresses – the show isn’t just on the catwalk, it’s everyone being there,” says Bahnsen, who’s been showing at Paris Fashion Week for the past several years. “It just has a relaxed and easy vibe to it.”
To honour the occasion, Bahnsen turned to her own archive, picking and choosing details from some of her most iconic garments to Frankenstein together an anniversary collection of brand new showpieces (some of which will be available made-to-order, others will exist as one-offs). “It’s been really amazing looking back at it and that you can combine 10 years of work into one collection,” says Bahnsen. “When I started out, I always said that I wanted it to be timeless and something you could wear across seasons, so I guess it did stand the test of time, as I wanted it to.”
Last season, for instance, featured column skirts with voluminous ruffles cascading from the back (a sort of business in the front, party in the back mullet skirt, if you will). This time around, Bahnsen took that concept, applying the extraordinary voluminous dresses from her very first collection to the back of simple shift dresses. “You still get this really slim silhouette, but then all of this movement,” Bahnsen notes. Elsewhere, purposefully unfinished chubby skirts with cascading ruffles float down the runway – a perfect distillation of Bahnsen’s point of view. Looking back, Bahnsen discovered her world had expanded over the years, quite literally. “I had this memory of the volumes being greater,” she says, of those first frocks. “But somehow we’ve added a metre or two more of volume every season.” Also in the mix, puffy hooded track jackets and teeny tiny shorts — a perfect palette cleanser between the delightful frocks.
To emphasise those delicious cupcake silhouettes, the entire collection is rendered in shades of white (aside from those clingy lilac tops). That is, until the bursts of silver, realised by way of sequins and foiling, applied haphazardly to the looks to create a sort of explosion of fireworks on the runway. “I think it kind of gives them an edge and takes them out of this romance,” she says. This was mirrored by literal silver fireworks, which exploded over the space as the models walked their finale.
Speaking of romance, beyond the runway the love was certainly there. Seeing the girls sat front row in 10 seasons work of Cecilie Bahnsen dresses, barely fitting next to one another in the benches, an explosion of fabric and colour and easy, unapologetic femininity, was truly a thing to behold. As Bahnsen took her bow, she received a long standing ovation as more than one guest wiped a tear from their eye. A birthday celebration unlike any other.
See all the looks from Cecilie Bahnsen's SS26 anniversary collection below.
