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It’s been 25 years since Camilla Stærk, she of the turbans, silver-screen eyebrows, and all-black wardrobe, launched her label. “Fashion is the way in which I found my creative voice,” said the designer, who will mark the anniversary with a release of 11 pieces from across her archive. Among them is a woven leather armor clutch, to which a fine chain has been added, by customer request, to allow for crossbody wear.
For Stærk, who has been actively exploring the world of interiors, that bag has acted like a compass directing her back to her roots. When Noma cofounder Mads Refslund opened Ilis in Brooklyn last year, he invited the designer to create uniforms for the staff, as well as rugs and lamps. “His brief to me was, ‘I just want you to do you,’ and he kept pointing at my signature clutch.” The designer created draped leather fixtures and others with corset-lacing details. These last nod to Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, whose work and style have been a “source of fascination” for the designer since having read Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales as a student in Denmark.
Furnishings and four-legged friends preceded fashion in Stærk’s life; her mother is a horsewoman and her father established a respected furniture company called Botium. (The designer’s truly gigantic oversize bag, she explained, nods to those her dad developed “as a beautiful gift-wrapping alternative to deliver the large Verner Panton glass trays that he would gift to people frequently.”) While Stærk started playing with her style as a teenager, it was never, she said, with the aim of being a designer. When it came time to graduate high school, she was “very close to going the furniture route…but then I really had an urge to find my own creative voice and rebel against my family in a nice way.”
After completing a foundation course at London College of Fashion, Stærk enrolled at Ravensbourne College. During the next to last year, the fledging designer landed an internship in New York City with Patrick Robinson, and that experience, she said, “confirmed the fact I want to do this.” She returned to London with the idea of launching her brand with her graduate collection, a career move that wasn’t as common in 2000 as it is today, and the planets aligned. Stærk showed her final project to a buyer at Browns Focus, who placed an order. “I didn’t tell anybody, but she told Hilary Alexander at the Daily Telegraph,” the designer related, “so the day after the graduation show Hilary did an amazing piece about it, and that led to a phone call from Fashion East, which was just starting that season, I was offered to be one of the four designers.”
Six years later Stærk fulfilled her dream of moving to New York, showing her first collection in the city, for spring 2007, days after landing at Scandinavia House. A mid-’00s It girl, the designer was her own best model, and over time her work became almost synonymous with her personal style, which might be summed up by the title of her fall 2008 collection, Black Bride of the Moon.
Asked to elaborate on the development of her aesthetic, the designer cites Old Hollywood as well as her grandmothers as contributing a “past-time appreciation to what I do—even though I hope it’s definitely modern too.” Stærk settled into all-black as part of her quest for simplicity. In school, a monochrome palette allowed her to focus “on silhouettes, the sculptural elements, the tactile textures, and how they would work together. I really loved the focus of that. And then there’s not having to think about [getting dressed every day],” she added. “I have a uniform, and that changes just with tiny little details, but it is always a uniform. And the head wrap I adopted during college, just to not have to think about my hair, and then it became part of my look.”
Stærk’s Edition Drop for spring 2026 is a distillation of her lean, forceful, and subtly erotic work. The dresses, skirts, and tops in the offering take inspiration from Martha Graham, Robert Mapplethorpe, French films, and the designer’s memories of an idyllic childhood in the Danish countryside. “The last few years I’ve been very focused on my home and collection and launching my first piece of furniture and sort of honoring my family roots, which has been incredible and very important to me,” Stærk notes, “but my fashion has never gone away—it has lived online in a curated version even though I haven’t done shows or offered it wholesale for a long time. And also, I never wanted to go away.”
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