Last season Rains’ Philip Lotko and Daniel Brix Hesselager relaunched Alis—a skate brand founded in 1995 in Christiania—as a fashionable streetwear label (and a kind of Danish Supreme, some said) with Tobias Birk Nielsen as designer. “We were young kids at the end of the ’90s, so we grew up seeing these box logo tees saying ALIS all around town,” reminisced Lotko in an interview. That nostalgia was the driving force behind the project was clear from the “comeback culture” tagline and was only confirmed by the (maybe too easy) choice of Oasis for the opening track of the show today.
None of the new team are skaters, but they are into sports. For spring, they landed on football (soccer) as the activity of the season, as a way to create some distance from decks and wheels. The cast included some local athletes and B93, a Danish team, donated leftover nets that Nielsen cleverly turned into airy over-garments.
Overall this was a straightforward offering of tracksuits, jeans (the brushed tan ones could pass for khakis), and hoodies. “Alis is really born as a simple streetwear brand, so our core items are sweatshirts and T-shirts, but this season we wanted to focus on the woven items”— jeans in particular, said Nielsen with a refreshing candor. Plaid added a bit of a grunge element, while woven slides with floppy fringe had a chill festival vibe.
Alis is a well-styled and uncomplicated offering with local relevance that needs no translation because of the ubiquity of sportswear. The show was presented outside by the water (models exited the scene on a canal boat) and drew a big, amiable crowd. Resonance came from the context. “We really wanted to emphasize that sort of Copenhagen youth energy where it is the most natural thing in the world to go from a dip in the harbor to a dinner and then to some training of some sort; that sort of natural embracing of your surroundings and the city and so on,” said the smiling designer. What is taken for granted by a Dane seems fantastical to a New Yorker. Ah, the wonders of a small city with clean water and clear vistas.
