Sia Arnika’s Berlin Fashion Week (BFW) shows tend to be a spectacle.
Last season, there were live flies buzzing around breeding boxes. For Autumn/Winter 2025, the set was a recreation of a fish auction house in Denmark, where the designer grew up. Show-goers could smell the salty scent of the seaweed, which was scattered on the floors between piles of snow (created using soap foam).
“I’ve been in contact with Danish fish auctions to see if we can borrow some things for the set, and my parents are driving down from Denmark and collecting little things from the beach to add in,” says Arnika ahead of her show. “It’s all hands on deck for these collections, which I’m so appreciative of because you can’t do this on your own as a small brand.”
It’s been a tough few years for independent brands, even more so for those outside of the four biggest fashion capitals — New York, London, Milan and Paris. BFW is still relatively small, but is growing fast thanks to investment from the German government, which has propped up its revival.
Arnika, who founded her brand in 2020 and debuted at BFW for AW23, is part of Fashion Council Germany’s main emerging talent programme Berlin Contemporary, which offers designers €25,000 each season, along with support for communications, show design, network connections and sales, as well as PR contacts. Arnika, who has become a schedule mainstay, says the support has allowed her to go bigger on her show concepts for the week’s growing international audience.
There’s a lot riding on this collection. Her SS25 release blew up thanks to dressing star of the summer Charli XCX for her 32nd birthday party in a white cutout top and black micro-shorts. Then, in November, Arnika launched a collection with Kylie Jenner’s label Khy, with a campaign featuring model Amelia Gray Hamlin alongside Jenner herself. “SS24 was a bit of a turning point where I saw the most amount of growth from the beginning,” Arnika says. The AW25 show felt noticeably bigger. Sales grew 40 per cent that season compared with AW23; usually, Arnika’s brand grows 15 to 20 per cent per season. Annual revenue in 2024 was in the six-figure range.
“I think Sia Arnika is one of the brands that really stood out for me [when I was in Berlin] because of the fantastic design skills, the notion of deconstruction, manipulation of fabrics, textures and textiles as well as how cool and modern this brand is with a strong sense of community and a specific customer to design for,” says Stavros Karelis, founder and buying director of London concept store Machine-A. After getting to know the brand while visiting BFW, Karelis decided to bring Arnika onto a new project he’s involved in: Popseekl, a social commerce app. “The work that Sia does really resonates with me and she is definitely one to watch.”
The AW25 collection is inspired by a woman Arnika remembers from her childhood. “She was always quite sexy and put together, so she stood out in a small town where everyone else is trying to blend in. She was a fierce entity. She became the focal point of the collection, and I’ve further developed it into this harbour bitch mystical creature who’s her own boss. The men lust after her, the kids are afraid of her, but she’s in her own world and she’s the ruler of the city somehow,” Arnika says.
The collection features plaid inspired by old photographs of fishermen from Danish archives. Arnika recreated a fish scale look by layering fish nets over a base fabric, adding boning to create a sea urchin shape. There are also bloomers with layered padding — which Arnika describes as “olden days meets hooker-wear”.
The juxtaposition of functional factory workwear with sexier pieces is typical of Arnika, who often plays with contrasting design aesthetics in her collections (she is equally inspired by her small home town in Denmark and Berlin’s subversive cultural scene). “I like that two opposite things can attract each other and work together. I like finding the middle ground,” she says. The brand also launched shoes for the first time this season: models wore mules and boots with a hooked heel, a subversive reinterpretation of a classic Danish work clog.
Making the most of a big boost
Arnika studied womenswear on ESMOD University’s Berlin campus. Before founding her own brand in 2020, she did stints at Ottolinger and Yeezy, among others. “I’ve taken a lot of knowledge about what to do and what not to do. What I’ve learnt the most is to have the confidence to not hold back, to really give your all,” says Arnika.
That’s what led to the Charli XCX moment: Arnika reached out to Charli’s stylist Chris Horan, feeling that the ‘British pop star’ was a nice fit for her brand’s identity. Arnika says the look that was worn, which is “one of the more demure looks”, quickly became a bestseller.
“Sia’s designs strike a delicate balance of being easy to wear and having high impact. She’s not afraid to make a statement, which aligns with all of my clients,” says Horan, who also styles Barbie Ferreira, Christina Aguilera and Shania Twain. “I think that she is one of the most exciting young designers and I think it’s evident that more and more people and celebrity stylists are catching on.”
The Khy collab came about following Arnika’s long history with Jenner’s stylists, sister duo Alexandra and Mackenzie Grandquist. “They were early adopters of the brand — they reached out when I had about 1,500 followers asking to borrow some stuff for Kylie. I was like, how in the world did you find me?” says Arnika. She was asked to design Khy’s holiday drop, which is still being sold online. It features festive sparkly micro-shorts, mini skirts, tops, low-rise pants and cutout dresses in three colourways — black, champagne and chartreuse. Retail prices range from £56 for the shorts to around £200 for some of the dresses (slightly lower than Arnika’s main line, which stretches up to around £540 for a bomber jacket). “The collection was light hearted, fun and vivacious rather than too serious,” Arnika says.
Instagram content
As is typical with Arnika, she appreciates the contrast in the Charli and Kylie aesthetics. “To sustain your business you need to grow — not just financially, but also with awareness,” she says. “By Charli and Kylie choosing me, it also solidifies my brand to the people who follow them. It’s interesting because Charli’s fan base is different from Kylie’s, so it’s nice that people can see my brand as not for just one specific person.”
Arnika is in talks to sign more collaborations this year, and her strategy is for the launches to coincide with significant drops of her core collection on her own site. “In the beginning, all you do is reach out to see if people want to collaborate and it feels like there’s a lot of pushing from your side, but now it feels like I don’t have to push so much anymore,” says Arnika.
Karelis references collaborations as a great way to boost brand awareness in an increasingly competitive landscape for emerging designers. “So many are now looking very close to what Sia does and what her brand is about. I think these incredible collaborations came because of the talent and hard work of Sia, and the best way is to carry on doing just that: working hard and focusing on designing strong collections while engaging with her community,” he says.
She’s in talks to sign more stockists, adding to the current list (Ssense and LN-CC). Nevertheless, direct-to-consumer (DTC) remains her primary focus. “I learnt from working with other brands in the past how the wholesale market can shift at any moment and to never 100 per cent rely on big orders. You need to have cash flow to keep your brand alive.” Focusing on DTC can be expensive, particularly in terms of marketing and production costs. “We have focused more on a model of organic marketing through community content, celebrity collaborations and editorial placements,” she says. “As a small brand, we don’t have big budgets to run ads constantly, so we’re trying to be thoughtful and not overspend just because you feel the pressure to be visible everywhere.”
In terms of production, Arnika says it’s a fine balance between meeting demand and ensuring she doesn’t overcommit to inventory, for both sustainability and financial reasons. The brand works closely with a handful of trusted manufacturers who are able to be flexible when demand spikes. “Over time, we’ve gotten better at predicting those spikes, using data to help us make smarter decisions about how much to produce and when,” she says.
Aside from the logistics, Arnika’s biggest challenge is managing her time as her brand continues to scale. “I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist, but I’m very interested in all aspects of the business and would like to learn it all, but there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything. Even if I get external consultants in to help, I want to know how to get things done and which people to contact. I am learning to let go, get the right people in and trust fully that it’s okay and that I don’t have to know everything,” she says. She’s hoping to hire for two to three full-time roles this year.
Ultimately, she wants to set herself up for long-term success. “I was OK with more gradual growth rather than exploding and not knowing how to deal with it,” she explains. “I’m hoping to be able to do this for the rest of my life, so it’s fine that it takes time to properly understand how to run a business. I’m a fashion designer and I never really learnt much about business, so instead of burning out too quickly I’d rather take the time to do it right.”
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