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From Acne Studios to Toteme to Our Legacy, Stockholm has birthed some of fashion’s most exciting brands, able to carve out their identities by striking a balance between chic design and wearable functionality. At the newly relaunched Stockholm Fashion Week, which returned this June after a six-year hiatus, a new guard of Stockholm fashion began to take shape.
These brands focus on simple design with unique details, high-quality products and sustainable practices. Their challenges range from standing out in a crowd of minimalist brands to navigating production in Sweden to planning for the ups and downs of the market.
Here, we spotlight three of the most exciting brands on the Stockholm Fashion Week schedule.
Leoní
Newcomer Leoní’s presentation was packed with guests, from local It-girls to buyers from Net-a-Porter. The womenswear brand was founded in 2024 by Filippa Fuxe, a graduate of Swedish design school Beckmans, who leads the creative direction, and Nathalie Schuterman, who leads the business side. Schuterman is a prominent name in Swedish fashion, having founded an eponymous multi-brand boutique that introduced a fair share of luxury brands to Stockholm and posed as an incubator for fledgling labels. The pair became known to each other through Fuxe’s boyfriend, who is related to Schuterman.
The company was initially launched within the Nathalie Schuterman Group and became independent in August 2024. It raised external funds from a VC firm, as well as Swedish entrepreneur Stefan Palm’s holding company Bucky Studios earlier this year. Over the past 10 months, revenue has reached around SEK 1.5 million (€136,885), with sales increasing 156 per cent in Q2 (March to June 2025), compared with Q1 (December 2024 to March 2025).
Set against a backdrop of antique art, ceramics and furniture, the collection featured flowy crinkled silk tops, buttoned cardigans and leather skirts with raw hems. Models came out in pairs, buttoning, zipping and adjusting each other’s outfits (Fuxe says the idea was to thematise the intimacy of dressing and highlight the functionality and versatility of the garments).
The challenge for brands like Leoní is to stand out among a crowd of minimalist Scandi labels. “We really focus on the details of the garment, like the inside,” Fuxe tells Vogue Business after the presentation, which was hosted at auction house Bukowskis. “We are minimalist but we don’t want to [be overly simple], we want to make beautiful things with beautiful craftsmanship,” adds Schuterman. “It also has to be new. Clients who buy Prada, Celine and Saint Laurent already have a good closet, but they’re looking for something that’s different — not too trendy but has a newness. We add a twist to classic looks with the materials or sculptural silhouettes.”
Prices range from around €200 for a silk tank top to around €500 for a cardigan and just under €1,800 for a leather jacket. The target customer is a woman in her 30s to 50s, who values stylish and high-quality designs, similar to that of Toteme.
Fuxe notes that production is a challenge. “We did a road trip around Sweden two weeks ago and found there’s not a lot of production [facilities] left here. There are a few that are brilliant, so we want to work with them because we want to do things locally,” she says.
Nevertheless, the brand is well placed to scale thanks to Schuterman’s connections and experience. Leoní is presenting a showroom in Paris later this month as well as during the city’s fashion week in October, with the aim of adding wholesale clients. Right now, the brand is exclusively distributed via its own e-commerce site. Long term, Fuxe says her vision is to scale internationally and to open a flagship store in Paris or London.
Past Tense
Menswear brand Past Tense was founded in 2023 by Victor Lindh, a former designer at Neil Barrett, Axel Arigato and Norse Projects, and Adrien Forray, who has held operational roles at LVMH, Kering, Axel Arigato and Norse, among others. The most recent collection was inspired by the escapism associated with Swedish summer. “We Swedes dream of summer for nine or 10 months of the year, talking about when the sun will come back and the weather will heat up. Then, when summer comes, we live like it will never end,” Lindh tells Vogue Business at the Stockholm Fashion Week showroom, which was hosted at events space Eric Ericsonhallen. The show began with a series of dark grey suits, representing the colder Swedish months, which transitioned into airier resortwear in light Tencel and cotton. The bags shifted from corporate totes to sailor duffles, and the shoes morphed from loafers into leather slides.
Lindh describes his customer as the classic Scandi guy, with a little added playfulness. Prices range from around €70 for a logo cap and €180 for a knitted crewneck T-shirt to around €900 for a leather overshirt. By the end of 2024, Past Tense had generated around €150,000 in sales, with a third originating from direct-to-consumer (DTC), a third from wholesale and a final third from creative services to third-parties. In 2025, the brand expects sales to grow 75 per cent, with wholesale sales doubling. Past Tense is backed by nine friends and family investors, each with industry links allowing them to collectively solve various roadblocks as they crop up.
Like Leoní, Past Tense also faces the challenge of standing out in a crowded market. “There’s a balance we’re juggling — we don’t want to create something that scares people off, it should be easy for anyone to pick it up. At the same time, it needs to be unique in different ways,” says Lindh. He points to the label on the sleeve of a blazer, which is tacked on at the four corners, allowing the wearer to remove it as they please. “We’re trying to be a little bit playful and unique in a way that intrigues people, but doesn’t shock them. We want it to be easy to put on for the average person and then the more creative geeky people can get into the details.”
Unlike many new brands, Past Tense is sticking to a more traditional model of building its foundation on wholesale. The brand has 10 stockists and aims to double the list with Spring/Summer 2026. Its key partners include Illum in Copenhagen, The Icon in Amsterdam, Tsum Kyiv and Reede in Estonia.
“It’s hard to control whether your brand will blow up on social media, so we thought wholesale is a safe way to go that requires less investment, and it can be our marketing, too,” says Lindh. Lindh says he wants customers to be able to see the details of the collection and to feel the fabric in-person, which is hard to offer when you’re a new brand without wholesale. The challenge is to build a strong enough connection with the customer that the brand is clearly defined in their mind, particularly when the aesthetic is more minimalistic. In terms of next steps, Past Tense is in the process of planning for a Paris Fashion Week showroom, as well as a trade show in Copenhagen. Long term, Lindh says he wants to find a physical showroom space in Stockholm that can double as an office.
Deadwood
Deadwood was one of the strongest on-schedule brands at Stockholm Fashion Week. It was founded in 2012 by Carl Ollson and Felix von Bahder, who met while working in a denim store. Deadwood began as a store selling vintage items alongside cool up-and-coming brands. It developed into a fashion label when the founders were looking for slimmer fitting leather jackets to stock and decided to create their own by upcycling vintage leather pieces. Prices range from around €300 for leather pants to between €500 and €2,700 for its leather jackets and coats.
Deadwood has been showing in Copenhagen for the past three seasons and is currently preparing to return to the Danish capital in August (along with designing items for Beyoncé’s upcoming Paris show during her Cowboy Carter tour). “We already knew we were going to do the Copenhagen show, but then we were asked if we wanted to show in Stockholm and it was too good of an opportunity to pass up,” von Bahder tells Vogue Business at the Deadwood store in Stockholm the day following the show. The brand spent five weeks creating a pre-spring 2026 collection to show in Stockholm.
Von Bahder has been taking inspiration from artificial intelligence and the clash between mankind and machines. “The first chapter is in Stockholm, it’s more of a messy, gritty, concrete situation in the city, and then we’ll take the battle between man and machine to the planes — a bigger space and a more poetic show for Copenhagen,” he says. The collection featured signature leather-on-leather looks (one showpiece that stood out was a skirt made from 13 stacked leather jackets — one for each year Deadwood has been in business), heavy faux fur coats, and dresses and shirts in unique silhouettes.
The next edition of Stockholm is yet to be confirmed (the organisers only secured funding for this year’s edition), but von Bahder says he could see himself continuing to show twice a year in Copenhagen and once a year in Stockholm — “a funky homecoming”, as he calls it. “In Copenhagen, we’re outsiders. I love the city and the shows we do, and there are some great brands there, but I never felt the camaraderie as much,” von Bahder says.
The brand received a positive response from the Japanese buyers in the audience. Deadwood has around 12 stockists, including Ssense, Assembly in New York, Hypebeast, Highsnobiety and a number of Korean and Japanese stores. Nevertheless, DTC is the priority given that it’s easier to sell smaller runs. “Since we work with deadstock and leftovers, it’s hard to scale in one SKU. We’re constantly creating small drops and small funky collections, so it’s easier if you speak directly to the customers,” says von Bahder. He’s also eyeing collaborations, potentially with a footwear brand (he’s particularly keen on Dr Martens).
One of the challenges the brand has faced is around planning for the boom and bust of the industry — but von Bahder says he’s learnt from the experience. During the pandemic, the brand was “weirdly booming” (sales grew between 50 and 70 per cent each year from 2018 to 2022, reaching around €1.3 million) so the founders hired more people and prepared for business to spike post-pandemic. It didn’t work out the way they expected, though. Sales have plateaued over the past two years, but the brand says it’s ready to shift gears and return to growth. “People wanted to go to restaurants and on holiday instead of buying clothes, so we had to recalibrate a bit,” von Bahder says. “We bootstrapped and worked hard and eventually managed to get through. But I guess if you’re ever so close to the edge that you can look down, next time it’s not so scary.”
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