At the 20th edition of Copenhagen Fashion Week, Paolina Russo and Lucile Guilmard — the designers behind London-based brand Paolina Russo — traveled back to the city where they made their runway debut two years earlier, feeling, in their own words, like the brand is more “grown up”.
“Last time we were here, the brand was really new, we hadn’t even set up our direct-to-consumer [channel] yet. Since then, we’ve started our DTC [e-commerce business], our community on Instagram has grown, and more people are wearing the brand,” says Russo, speaking from the brand’s temporary Copenhagen studio, as her London team of handknitters make finishing touches to the pieces. Paolina Russo is one day out from its Fall/Winter 2026 show. “We’ve learned an awful lot in the past two years.”
The biggest learning of all, Russo and Guilmard say, has been how to grow a viable business out of a creative idea, something they recognize is largely down to growing consumer awareness in a brand’s infancy. Now, for its FW26 collection, the duo is doubling down on growing their DTC audience by incorporating tech into the garments, via NFC (near-field communication) chips embroidered onto their knitwear and developed in collaboration with US-based tech manufacturer Avery Dennison.
These chips — woven into what the pair are calling “community badges” and which resemble the Girl Scout-style badges that run as a motif throughout all Paolina Russo collections — are an effort to bridge the physical and digital worlds. When scanned with a mobile phone, the chips send the user through an interactive portal, which they can click through to land straight on the Paolina Russo e-commerce site and browse the collection, so that each garment becomes a “living portal” to encourage sales, the pair explain.
Canadian-born Russo founded the brand in London in 2020, after graduating from Central Saint Martins, and was joined by her French co-founder Lucile Guilmard in 2022, also a Central Saint Martins graduate. In June 2023, the pair won the first Zalando Visionary Award, which recognized their sustainable local craft and materials. As part of the award, the brand received a €50,000 cash prize, as well as full funding and production for their first show, held two months later, during CPHFW SS24.
The Zalando funding helped them invest in the chip technology. “It’s a really cool way for us to incorporate tech into ancient crafted elements, a fusion we’ve always been interested in, and at the same time connect more people to the Paulina Russo universe, whether they are a part of it or new to it,” says Russo.
The brand’s ninth collection, shown in Copenhagen’s French Embassy on Thursday, is inspired by girlhood and the feeling of one’s first school trip abroad, featuring knitwear from Peru and woolen jersey from Portugal that were born out of collaborations with local artisans.
“At the same time as exploring this new tech, there are still strong handcrafted elements in the collection,” Guilmard says, explaining how the brand works closely with French Peruvian creative studio Maison Anaychay, which connects designers with local artisans in Peru. “The women there really specialize in this old embroidery crochet craft from Peru, and it’s a way for them to be able to stay at home, crochet, knit, and make a living wage, while taking care of their families. At the same time, we are able to access this craft, which is ancient, and we’re helping to sustain it into the future.”
Russo and Guilmard hope that by incorporating the future-forward NFC badges into these ancient-crafted designs, they can drive more DTC sales via a connection with potential customers that is more memorable than a social media scroll and takes away a point of friction.
“All the time, when you’re wearing something, and someone asks where you got it, you have to go through the process of looking it up separately, but now you can just tap and instantly find us here,” Guilmard says. “We’re really exploring our DTC pathway; it’s just a way more direct avenue to grow our community.”
It’s not the first time that the brand has attempted to bridge the digital and physical worlds in order to bring consumers into its brand world. In 2023, they collaborated with Dover Street Market on an exclusive Paolina Russo collection within Roblox, alongside a physical installation in-store, which they say went “really well”. The pair also says that while they’re not using AI for creative ideas, they’re using the technology “an awful lot” on the operations side.
“Generationally, we grew up with The Sims and playing video games, and the fact that this sort of fantasy can exist in reality now feels nostalgic but also cool,” says Russo. “It’s really magic for us every time we can do something digital.”
The pair have been experimenting with how they can use technology to craft garments since they founded the brand, which Russo says was in part born out of a degree project, where she developed a programmable knitting technique for a knitting machine, and is a way to make the business more scalable. “We’re always really inspired as a starting place by something real, physical, handmade, and then transforming that into something that’s actually reproducible is amazing,” she says. The latest collection is a combination of the two, featuring digitally enabled knitting techniques like illusion knitting on heavy knitwear, as well as handmade friendship bracelets and hair braids.
“Since the beginning, we’ve always thought that technology isn’t the thing that’s going to get rid of craft. It’s actually going to be the thing that sustains it and pushes it forward into the future,” says Guilmard. “We believe that they should exist together.”
With sustainability as a core ethos of the brand, Russo and Guilmard are well aware that with the EU’s digital product passport (DPP) deadline fast approaching, their NFC chips present a handy testing ground for the types of post-purchase digital worlds that can be built via chips directly woven into garments. Unlike some regulations, the DPP obligations will apply to brands at the product level from 2027, regardless of company size. So while developing them now might be a major investment — and current user adoption is typically low — early adopters will be at an advantage when the deadline arrives, and brands will have no choice but to comply with the supply-chain focused sustainability disclosures.
“These conversations around DPPs and the traceability of garments are really interesting when it comes to the post-purchase journey and really understanding your clothes,” says Russo. “So there are so many avenues and possibilities with this technology — this is just the first step. At the end of the day, DPPs are like education, and as this collection highlights, education is fun, school can be fun. And education and sustainability married like that can be extra fun.”
