After five years away, Swedish upcycling brand Rave Review returns to the Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule with a collection that’s softer, sharper, and stripped to its core. Less Gucci, more Mah-Jong, the duo prove you can come home again — and look effortlessly cool doing it
Rave Review may be Swedish, but seeing the brand back on the Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule for the first time in five years (following a heroes journey of sorts, during which it showed on-schedule in Milan) felt like a homecoming. After all, what could be more Copenhagen than an upcycling brand with a cool-girl attitude? “Copenhagen has always been in the back of our mind – and there were also a lot of people telling us about it,” says co-founder Josephine Bergqvist. Her co-founder Livia Schück laughs, adding, “We got that question so many times: ‘Why aren’t you showing in Copenhagen?’” After coming to the realisation that the brand yearns to be high fashion but not necessarily a full-blown fashion house (“We’re more accessible – we’re not Gucci,” says Bergqvist with a laugh), the designers decided it was time to show on Scandinavian soil.
For its anticipated spring/summer '26 comeback, Rave Review returns a little more refined than it left. Yes, the focus is still on bringing new life to discarded fabrics, but in lieu of upcycled blankets and bedding (though there’s still a bit of that, by way of showpieces, mostly) the fabric is largely deadstock (the brand works with Italian deadstock agency Fabric House). The resulting looks are less an exploration of material by way of print, texture and power-clashing and more a considered, utterly hip approach to texture, subtle patchwork and silhouette. Rave Review stripped down to its core.
Take, for instance, the exaggerated rounded shoulders and hips found on tailored skirts and jackets (it looks like padding, but in fact it’s boning – the pieces themselves are feather-light) or the matching jacket and skirt combo, made of floral bedlinen treated in such a way that it appears permanently wrinkled (a slept-in bed, as it were). Elsewhere, that boning is applied to the trim of simple cotton skirts (both midi and mini), instantly creating a flouncy, bouncy street style essential. This idea is explored further via a standout pair of bloomers, overlaid with a pair of teeny tiny underwear (for the more daring street style star).
When she was first imagining the collection, Bergqvist, who took lead this time around whilst Schück was on maternity leave, happened to run into her very cool neighbour, the iconic Swedish artist Marie-Louise Ekman. “I admire her so much,” says Bergqvist. “I saw her with a Loewe scarf and she looked so nice. So I dug a little bit into her early work from the '70s, and I always get inspired by that.” The works informed both the collection’s muted pastel colour palette and its teeny tiny florals (other florals appear on the moodboard by way of the blooming fields in Skåne, in southern Sweden).
But it was Ekman’s appearance in the advertisements for cult 1970s Swedish brand Mah-Jong, an early cool-girl sustainability pioneer, that really caught the attention of the designer. “I always thought we were sort of the Mah-Jong of our time,” says Bergqvist, aptly. And with that Rave Review – more Mah-Jong than Gucci – proves once and for all you can come home again, and look good doing it.
See all the looks from Rave Review's SS26 collection below:
