Nicklas Skovgaard might be the young prince of Danish fashion, but he’s no Hamlet, wracked with existential angst. There’s no room for that in the dress-up, be-bold world of this flaxen-haired Dane. The designer’s ’80s fixation has carried over from last season, and it has a specific source, his mother. The aerobics videos she made during that decade were playing alongside clips created for the season in collaboration with Britt Liberg.
Skovgaard has made the bubble silhouette a signature. There were quite a variety this time around, some of which sang (see the pouf ballooning out from under a long-lined sequined “tunic” or the look with the waist of the full skirt rising to the Empire line), though a few others looked lumpy and awkward. The bubble shape wasn’t the only familiar look in the collection. As the location for the presentation was a white-walled gallery, Skovgaard conceived of the collection as having retrospective elements. Floral and graffiti prints referenced motifs often found in museums. Also art-related were the trompe-l’oeil pieces, an idea that grew out of an interview the designer did last year in which he was asked to select a favorite painting. He landed on a 17th-century trompe l’oeil canvas by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts.
There was no trickiness to the appeal of a bow-topped maillot, a Members Only-ish jacket, a big-shouldered pink button-front jumpsuit, or an unexpected pinstripe shorts suit. The draped jerseys, especially those with a waist yoke, had a Japanese designers-in-Paris-meets-Dune feeling that felt right. Generally speaking, the collection would have benefitted from an edit, and more care taken with the construction. That said, iterations on Skovgaard’s work, especially the life-saver-ring poufs, have been seen in the student collections here.
The super-charged ’80s exist as a fantasy to Skovgaard, who was born in the mid-’90s, and he seeds the videos he knew as a child through a new lens today. “For me, what makes sense about what I’m doing is that it’s really founded on the personal perspective or this personal memory; and my mother was really the one who introduced me to fashion,” he said. “I feel like I came closer to my mother through my own work.” Skovgaard’s designs are idiosyncratic, and as such they encourage connection; they call out to individualists, to those with a sense of fun and pomp, who follow their hearts rather than the dictates of good taste.
