The dissolving boundary between home and work life was the subject of Bonnetje’s Anna Myntekær and Yoko Maja Hansen’s fall show, their first as part of Copenhagen Fashion Week’s New Talent program. The duo, both graduates of Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands, worked at Maison Margiela (Hansen) and Cecilie Bahnsen (Myntekær) before building their brand around upcycled men’s suiting. “We like taking something masculine and very formal and then transforming it into something feminine and a bit odd,” Hansen told me a year ago. Odd edging on the erotic might be a more precise way of putting it—among the NSFW looks for fall was a business-in-front-party-in-back dress cut to reveal the bottom, a perhaps unintentionally literal take on what Myntekær described as this season’s focus on “the backside of work life and professionalism.”
The pair’s interest in corporate codes derives from their materials and also their own work environment. “We actually have our studio in an old office building and it’s kind of a weird atmosphere; it’s completely empty, but there’s so many traces from the work life that was there before,” Myntekær explained. It’s those traces that led to the creation of Venetian blind-like construction, and pieces made out of plastic sheet protectors, a witty twist on the BDSM latex look.
Tess McGill wasn’t on the designers’ mood board, but that’s what the audience saw when a wooden door in their show space opened and out came Siggy Sonne, hair done, stepping high, in a deconstructed skirt suit with deep cleavage. A certain eroticism differentiates Bonnetje from other upcycling labels, but this season the designers pushed forward into an overt sexiness that approached camp. (One exception was a 3D skirt with “flowers” made of shirt collars that called back to the dramatic petal-strewn looks of their fall 2024 debut.) “When we collect all these old suits and shirts…it brings a story…sometimes you can smell the perfume of the previous owner, it really starts your imagination,” Hansen said. They should hold onto that—the more the designers harness the power of suggestion, the stronger their work will be.
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