In Cecilie Bahnsen’s airy studio is a rack of angelic all-white pieces. All of these garments had been pulled from the designer’s archive in advance of a celebratory presentation marking her first decade in business. Bahnsen has been showing in Paris since fall 2022 and her return to the Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule has been the talk of the town. For her part, Bahnsen is delighted that all of her team, past and present, will be able to take part in the proceedings.
Where to start? For today’s show, Bahnsen first decided that everything had to be made out of an existing dress or existing fabric. The designer is relying on the lush green of the vast outdoor venue as well as the bright hues of the guests’ dresses to provide color; the anniversary collection itself has been made in a sparkling clean palette of white and silver. That means the clothes “need to be even more theatrical or impressive” than usual, a quality Bahnsen has achieved by creating one-off hybrid dresses that often stack piece-on-piece.
“I wanted to have more layering than we had when we were showing in Copenhagen, and build the silhouette up more like we are doing in Paris now,” Bahnsen says. “We started from the silhouette of the bustle dress from fall 2025, but asked ourselves what if it got even more messy?” One way is to create unexpected volumes by juxtaposing or tying garments on top of each other, or further narrowing Empire necklines.
Bahnsen has built a universe in which princess dresses made of the ethereal materials and floral motifs she favors aren’t just for special occasions, but for everyday wear. To avoid things becoming saccharine, she’s introduced sporty elements and denim. The anniversary collection includes a hoodie and short set made from an archival dress.
In some cases, Bahnsen’s poufy shapes are exaggerated by the addition of boning to hold even more exaggerated volumes. Taking things in a new direction are dresses with a surprise, like narrow looks in which the volume has been moved to the back, or pencil-slim silhouettes from under which flounces of tulle burst out. “I like that when you see a dress from the front, it just reads as this quite simple shift dress, but then when you turn around,” Bahnsen notes you get this wow.
For the finale Bahnsen and her team dreamed up some asymmetrical silver gowns shimmering with hyper-romanticized disco ball glitz. If today’s show is a sort of goodbye to the past, tomorrow is future focused; it’s then that she will open her first store in Copenhagen. The shop is intended to be by-appointment-only, but customers who wander in won’t be turned away. “I’m very excited to see the whole universe together,” she says.
Distilling so much work into a coherent collection has been a pleasant challenge for the designer, who documented the process for Vogue.
Scroll through the full runway collection below.
