Solitude Studios went rogue during Copenhagen Fashion Week, presenting an off-schedule collection in the cool and shadowy Kongernes Lapidarium, a museum located in a 400-year-old royal brewery building filled with historical sculptures that is also used by contemporary artists. This bridge between past and present was also present in Solitude Studios’s collection. Designers Jonas Sayed Gammal Bruun and Sophia Martinussen blended ancient inspiration with the modern; think viking-meets-grunge-meets-organicore. The image that came to my mind was of ruins that green nature had started to reclaim, Ozymandius but with moss and algae. The addition of Seattle-friendly plaids to the brand’s collaged aesthetic was a step forward to a more robust fashion proposal.
Solitude Studios has had some success with their seaweed bags, but this season, the design duo’s focus was on “the peat bog, which plays a major role in Danish history, and the general development of cultures and societies in the northern hemisphere.” They explained, “We draw parallels from our ancestors’ symbiotic life with the bog, to the wishing well, seen in the modern cityscape.” “For me Solitude represents some kind of Scandinavian punk. “I love that they are so young and freely mash up medieval folklore and pop,” says Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær who has walked twice for the brand.
Bruun and Martinussen did their homework, but you don’t need to understand the symbolism to appreciate the clothes. In their willingness to get their hands dirty, the designers share something in common with Hussein Chalayan who famously decayed his early designs by burning them in a garden. Where the Cypriot interred, these Danes submerged their fabrics as one leg of a round-trip journey. Hope is to be found in the possibility of resurfacing and regenerating, and that’s what Solitude Studios delivered.
The designers sat down to discuss their mission and the fabrication of their fall collection.
What is Solitude Studios?
We see ourselves as a brand who is always pushing to innovate both in craftsmanship and ideas. For us, good fashion equals a mix of story-telling and pushing garments further; making garments is just a form of communication, a language really. This is how we communicate what’s on our mind, what we love or hate, or just find interesting. We use it to reflect upon the world.
Your approach to sustainability seems unique. Tell me more about it.
We view sustainability as a matter of course, not a selling point. The strategy many use, of talking about sustainability as a selling point, is creating a paradox in of itself, and honestly it sometimes becomes an excuse for a lesser product. We strive to change the collective consciousness around humans’ relation to nature, and question the ways we live with it, or without it. Any way or shape, really. And we try not to judge or take sides, just highlight a curiosity.
Nature in daily rhetoric is synonymous to a forest, or the ocean—but we like to approach it from a philosophical point of view. Nature is everything, even chance and luck. We as humans are nature, and us being dependent on nature only means that nature is dependent on itself. All of our collections have been tales from different points of view on this matter. Questioning alienation is definitely a way of trying to change the point of view of how we see it. And also, our shapes and textures in the pieces we make (hopefully) can spark the realization that for example, a handbag is also nature, and is derived from natural resources. (See our seaweed bag for example.)
We can talk for hours on end about this, as this is a fascination that sparked Solitude Studios from the start, and we will always find new curiosities and questions of how to approach it.
Can you highlight some of the materials you used this season?
In the collection we used multiple fabrics that we submerged underwater for months and dyed in a local peat bog before being cut into garments. The bog is near Sophia’s childhood home. In kindergarten the adults would tell her that the reason for the bog’s red-colored water was that the elves would wash their clothes in it. Remembering this story made her realize that we could in fact dye our clothes there. On the biological aspect of it, the water is rich in ochre and iron that colors the fabric, and also molds and micro-organisms play a factor in the patterns that occur.
All of the fabric we put in there is made of natural fibers and the fabric definitely decomposes. If we leave them for too long they simply vanish! We have had a lot of trial and error, both with seasonal changes of weather and timing to get the right result. Whenever it fails, we summarize it [by saying], ‘the bog gives, and the bog takes.’ It takes us two full days to clean each fabric after retrieving it from the bog.
Why is the collection called Hibernating Hopes?
The collection visualizes an increasing alienation of natural forces in step with technological development. [We envisioned] an overgrown wishing well that had been out of use for so long that the water filled with duckweed, creating a solid layer instead of fluidity and clearness. Our hopes in hibernation.
Having dyed fabrics in our local peat bog for a few years, we soon realized that it feels there is some truth to the murky water, as if it holds wisdom that we neglect. We felt strangely connected to it, and after a visit to an exhibition at Moesgaard Museum, in Aarhus, about the Danish Iron Age and start of the Peat Era, we realized that the way the ancients treated the bog was with a sense of hope and awe, as this manifestation of something higher. They didn’t look to the sky, they looked in the water and sacrificed their most precious belongings to it, with the belief of getting something in return from nature. The museum is filled to the brim with bracelets, swords, and other valuables that have been retrieved from the bogs. This is where our parallel to the wishing well arose, as we realized society’s most prized possession today is currency, and throwing coins in a wishing well feels like a direct continuation of our predecessor’s rituals of sacrifice.
The decline of wishing wells seems to symbolize that we have lost hope that nature will give us anything in return, a sort of alienation. It’s as if the things we do in everyday life to feel good—to feel anything—are surreal, simulated somehow. The instincts and needs are real, but the places to fulfill them aren’t adequate. We have built layers upon layers of ways to fulfill desires, dreams, and hopes, yet somehow the true sense of fulfillment was lost somewhere between them. A cliché example of this is shopping as a means to dopamine. Do you ever really feel fulfilled, once you accomplish that thing you wanted to? When do you feel most fulfilled? These are questions we have been very curious about.
We wished to visualize these thoughts throughout the collection, with a combination of coins and modern artifacts (headphones and vapes covered in textures imitating those of the restored museum items) as accessories. We experimented with construction and draping techniques that imitate the fluidity of water, and tried to recreate the color schemes, textures, and shapes of the bog findings in more modern and recognizable clothing items. We took the silhouettes of hoodies, miniskirts, and the iconic Jeffrey Campbell boots and imagined how they would look if these had been hibernating alongside our hopes, under the waters of the peat-bog, or oxidized with the coins in the well.
You spoke about spirituality in your show notes. How exactly does this relate to the collection?
Spirituality is of course a key factor as it describes that sense of hope and connection to something bigger than ourselves. We see it as an essential part of the human experience, that we all at some point will either go up to the sky or to the depths of the bog for answers we ourselves are unable to procure.
How did the show location relate to the collection?
It was incredibly important for us to get the show location just right, and as soon as we found this space, Kongernes Lapidarium, it immediately felt like the perfect time-capsule. Located in the city center, it is the King’s old storage space for the casts of different sculptures placed around Copenhagen, and is actually still in use as a sculptor’s workshop to this day. The old souls of the sculptures watching over the show was the perfect way of creating a parallel to our story—from our ancestors in the bog to the modern city.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
