Nicklas Skovgaard: SS25 Looks at CPHFW

CPHFW

Aug 17

An avant-garde showcase of edgy silhouettes dripping with unconventional style.

We’re putting a CPHFW standout spotlight on designer Nickolas Skovgaard, who’s collection’s are a nostalgic throwback with an artful avant-garde edge. Skovgaard is a considered, luxury womenswear brand, with a “strong elocution intending to delight through unexpected parallels” according to Copenhagen Fashion Week’s profile.

Danish Designer Nicklas Skovgaard was nominated as a finalist of the Wessel & Vett Fashion Prize 2022, and is the up-and-coming “It Girl” Scandi brand as professed by Harper’s Bizarre. Known for captivating silhouettes in their unexpected forms and juxtapositions, the Copenhagen-based brand curates the dreamlike state clothes can create in their whimsy. Founded in 2020, “the brand aims to explore the relationship textiles can hold in expressing narratives through the marriage of unexpected material and classical form. Creating his own textiles that cultivate an exceptional surface, Nicklas Skovgaard taught himself weaving after discovering a small loom and crafting swatches of his own fabric. Expanding on to a bigger surface allowed Nicklas to create larger pieces moulded into jackets, hats and capelets. With his handmade textiles mapped against contradictory fabrications and cut into unexpected silhouettes, there is a strange visual appeal to the combinations that range from hand-woven wool fabric merged with water repellant fabric, silk taffeta and stretch jersey. All resulting in silhouettes that are captivating in their unexpected manipulations and combinations, hoping to profess a dreamlike state clothes can affect. Constructing two collections a year, each body of work for Nicklas Skovgaard builds upon the last, acting with an evolutionary purpose and building an ever-evolving vocabulary. Orchestrating these classical and strange symphonies within his eponymous textiles and recognizable design, Nicklas Skovgaard is a brand cultivated on the edge of romanticism and realism.” (Copenhagen Fashion Week’s blog).

For spring/summer '25, Nicklas Skovgaard takes his nostalgic view of puffed up glitz and glamourous sportswear. Taking advantage of Copenhagen Fashion Week’s new presentation format, the Danish designer offered up an aesthetic of '80s prom and aerobics class. Models grooved along to 'Maniac' in kitschy Flashdance fashion.

The designer’s third CPHFW outing was also a Nicklas Skovgaard Exhibition, almost a premature but ambitious retrospective – in the format of a white cube survey building off of his previous two shows as well as the brand new artful performance piece, showcasing his spring/summer 2025 vision.

“It’s something people do after 30 years of work, so I thought it would be fun to take the best elements of the two past shows and put it in a gallery space,” he says. “Whenever I start working on a new collection, I take elements of the past collections I’ve done,” he says. “It could be a very specific silhouette or a specific material or even a cut or the way that it’s styled.”

According to Vogue Scandinavia the first room featured “video footage of Skovgaard’s celebrated debut, in which performance artist and frequent collaborator Britt Liberg dramatically dressed herself in the designer’s now-signature balloon skirts and draped dresses. Also hung throughout the space, stop motion images from the lookbook captured at his second runway show, which further emphasised his love of the '80s by way of dropped waists and big blowouts.”

With drop-waist bubble dresses, frilly-capped sleeves and lacy leggings, there are prints, both florals and painstakingly made trompe l’oeil frocks that create the illusion of Skovgaard’s '80s pouf-skirt silhouettes.

Skovgaard also draws inspiration from his mother in his body of work. “She woke my interest in fashion in a way,” says Skovgaard of his mum. “It’s fun to imagine the life she had before I was born” — paying homage to a specific image of her in 90’s wearing a white cotton strapless dress with a chunky red belt. The designer recreated the dress with a structured latex lining. All the looks from his SS25 collection just scream MOTHER, but with an innocent twist of playing costumed dress-up.

Swedish Stockings teamed up with Skovgaard, who has long held a personal connection to hosiery, and highlighted stockings as a transformative accessory. “To me, stockings are the ultimate accessory,” he shared, recalling how his mother’s diverse collection of stockings influenced his love for fashion.

Linn Frisinger, founder and CEO of Swedish Stockings, emphasized that the collaboration was an opportunity to showcase the brand’s commitment to sustainability and craftsmanship. “Our mission has always been to inspire sustainable change in fashion without compromising on quality and design,” she said.

Swedish Stockings, established in 2013 as the world’s first sustainable hosiery brand, continues to push the boundaries of fashion with eco-friendly production methods. The collaboration with Skovgaard at Copenhagen Fashion Week reinforces their mission to elevate tights from a disposable item to an essential fashion staple.

View curated looks from the Nicklas Skovgaard SS25 collection below: