What Keeps Me Writing About Fashion Right Now
From Minneapolis to Copenhagen, and the kind of fashion I still believe in
I’ve struggled with writing lately – especially about fashion. There are two reasons. And they’re both tied, in different ways, to the weakening of our democracy and the rise of fear-based rule. The first is what’s been happening in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is my hometown. It’s where I came of age, and it’s where much of my extended family still lives.
Like many Minnesotans we have Scandinavian roots (Oslo and Trondheim Norway specifically) but over time we’ve become American. And what I mean when I say this is that the background of my extended family is Norwegian. And Irish. And Hispanic. And East Asian. And Black –also Catholic, Buddhist and Jewish.
My grandmother used to delight in what she called her own “rainbow coalition”.
My younger sister works as a hospital translator. She told me recently—before the killings in Minneapolis—about a man ICE brought in for medical treatment after he had been badly beaten. She translated for the doctor exactly what the agents had done to him, listening to his fear, trying to remain steady, feeling utterly powerless. All the while, two agents stood like sentries outside the door, waiting to take him away.
Unlike the ICE agents in the media, these two wore no identification and completely blended in. My sister told me hospital staff have learned to recognize unmarked cars circling the building. Some of the white hospital workers have started driving new mothers home themselves—quietly, without being asked. The women and their newborns crouch down in the back seat.
This is what’s happening in our country. This is what resistance looks like.
…so there’s that.
The other thing is the uphill battle against the (F)ashion INDUSTRY feels steeper than ever. Legislation meant to curb fast fashion and protect the environment is being rolled back or quietly sidelined. Non-profits advocating for garment workers’ rights are folding. Jeff Bezos is underwriting the Met Gala—alongside rumors that Amazon is interested in acquiring Condé Nast. The message is not subtle. Profit still comes first, no matter how carefully the language is dressed up.
…and yet.
I agreed to teach in the new Fashion + Communication MFA program at Pratt Institute. This alone has kept me in conversation with fashion. With better fashion. With what the medium can still be.
And fortunately, you don’t have to look very far.
Copenhagen Fashion Week just wrapped, and—unsurprisingly—the Scandinavians know how to put on a show. CPHFW was the first fashion week to introduce minimum ethical and environmental requirements back in 2020 and it became stronger because of it.
In this climate, a platform that still asks brands what they’re actually doing feels almost defiant and if you want to see fashion’s potential there is no better place to begin.
Here are a few designers and brands from the AW26 CPHFW shows who are genuinely doing things differently—and better.
Stem
Sarah Brunnhuber’s Stem operates on a principle that sounds almost too good to be true: zero-waste woven garment production. The Copenhagen-based brand, founded in 2021, has developed a proprietary weaving, cutting, and sewing technique that eliminates production waste entirely. Shape, pattern, and function are embedded directly into the fabric during the weaving process, leaving seams and fringes visible as evidence of the garment’s construction. For autumn/winter 2026, Brunnhuber titled the collection To Wool—both an ode to the fibre and a verb suggesting action. The innovation at the heart of this season was Elastic Wool, a high-twist yarn that behaves like stretch fabric without synthetic additives, developed over several years and now translated into industrial production. The wool itself was sourced from a Danish shepherd and spun locally. The colour palette—navy, off-white, brown—emerged from the deadstock yarns available in the required quality and quantity, a constraint Brunnhuber embraced rather than fought. Form follows technique here, and the results are exquisite.
Taus
Founded in 2024 by Freyja Taus and Juho Lehiö, Taus approaches fashion as dialogue rather than novelty. The Copenhagen studio produces ready-to-wear and demi-couture pieces rooted in craftsmanship and slowness, with each garment hand-sewn in their local atelier over a period of months. Their commitment to upcycled materials is rigorous: the autumn/winter 2026 collection incorporated discarded home textiles turned backside-up for texture, as well as suits from Lehiö’s late grandfather.
Aesthetically, the collection channeled darkly romantic femininity and unapologetic self-expression, drawing inspiration from early 20th-century queer history in Berlin—particularly the progressive communities that existed before their destruction by the Nazi regime.
Bonnetje
Anna Myntekær and Yoko Maja Hansen founded Bonnetje after graduating from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, bringing experience from Cecilie Bahnsen and Maison Margiela respectively. The brand’s concept is deceptively simple: cut up old suits and reassemble the pieces into new silhouettes. In practice, this means sleeves appear where collars should be, buttons migrate to unexpected locations, and menswear is transformed into feminine, avant-garde forms.
For autumn/winter 2026, the designers leaned into surrealism, studying how artists like René Magritte and Max Ernst employed repetition and strange symbols. A dress constructed entirely from white tank tops. A gown fashioned from shirt cuffs. Pumps adorned with vintage keychains that jingled against the presentation’s live piano soundtrack. Despite the conceptual complexity, the silhouettes remain wearable—classic shapes relocated.
Paolina Russo
Paolina Russo continues to prove that responsible production can coexist with joy, color, and exuberance. For autumn/winter 2026, they presented a collection inspired by the first school trip taken outside one’s hometown—that feeling of possibility when the world suddenly expands. Uniforms became a vehicle for individuality rather than conformity, with pleated skirts, rugby stripes, and collegiate crests reimagined in clashing pastels and neon pops.
I’m a fan of the brand’s material commitments: the collection featured mono-fibers (100 percent wools, 100 percent cottons) and graphics laser-etched directly into denim and corduroy rather than printed. More significantly, they collaborated with local artisans in Peru through Maison Anaychay, a French Peruvian creative studio that connects designers with craftspeople specializing in ancient embroidery and crochet techniques. This partnership provides women with living wages while allowing them to work from home caring for their families, sustaining traditional skills into the future.
Nazzal Studio
Sylwia Nazzal made history at Copenhagen Fashion Week as the first Palestinian designer to show at the event. Her brand, Nazzal Studio, exists at the intersection of fashion, ethics, and activism, with Palestinian heritage and resistance at its core. The autumn/winter 2026 collection, Al-Najah (Survival), drew inspiration from Bedouin traditions—the knowledge of how people survived and found purpose in some of the world’s most unforgiving landscapes. Working alongside contemporary artist Jad Maq, Nazzal incorporated Bedouin tattoo motifs and Palestinian Tatreez symbols using natural henna dye. Buttery leather and undyed natural latex—fabricated by the designer and her collaborator themselves—formed lofty, Bedouin-inspired silhouettes. An elaborate braiding technique requiring days to complete a single piece added texture to hooded jackets and relaxed tailoring.
At the heart of the process was community: Palestinian refugee women hand-wove macramé pieces resembling traditional jewellery, scaled up dramatically. Staged at The David Collection, home to Scandinavia’s largest collection of Islamic art, the presentation honored heritage while championing the economic empowerment of displaced artisans.
SSON: One to Watch
Swedish brand SSON made its Copenhagen Fashion Week debut as a One to Watch—a designation for emerging labels not yet screened against CPHFW’s minimum standards but introduced to the framework’s expectations. Co-founded by creative director Yulia Kjellsson and Ellinor Håkansson in 2024, SSON works exclusively with secondhand materials, sourcing from charity shops that cannot sell their overflow of donated textiles.
The autumn/winter 2026 collection, titled The Fortunate Ones, confronts this excess head-on. A mountain of discarded clothes dominated the presentation space, a literal monument to over-consumption. The garments themselves emerged from this abundance. Some pieces were constructed intuitively from intact garments; others followed traditional pattern methods. This tension between instinct and system mirrors the broader uncertainty around sustainability itself.
SSON offers no easy answers or performative eco-purity—just the discomfort of acknowledging fashion’s waste problem while still producing. The resulting pieces, however, feel considered, functional, and genuinely wearable.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of designers at Copenhagen Fashion Week—but it is more than enough to remind us that real imagination, material intelligence, and ethical ambition are still very much alive. I’ll be attending NYFW selectively this year, writing only about shows that rise to this level.
All fashion images above ©James Cochrane, courtesy CPHFW