By Gabriela Afanador
Tuesday 11, August 2026
Photo via @nicklasskovgaard on Instagram
Nicklas Skovgaard launched his brand in 2020 and has spent the years since building one of the most genuinely anticipated slots on the Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule. The anticipation is not industry hype in the manufactured sense. It comes from the fact that every season he creates a complete world around his collection, a specific fictional or historical universe that gives the clothes their emotional logic, and every season that world is different enough from the last that you actually want to see what he has decided this time. For SS27 that world was the 1960s, and more specifically a fictional girl group he invented and named The Skovgaardettes, an imagined act with its own aesthetic identity, its own characters, and its own particular brand of unapologetic femininity. It is a more specific and more interesting starting point than generic decade nostalgia, and the collection it produced was one of the most visually cohesive things shown at Copenhagen Fashion Week this week.
The show itself was, as Skovgaard’s shows always are, as much about the experience as the clothes. Models arrived to the venue by vintage car, the entrance part of the performance before a single look had appeared on the runway. Inside, a live set from True Blue, produced in collaboration with Danish music platform Brodie Sessions, ran through the presentation, the sound giving everything happening inside it the quality of something genuinely live and slightly unpredictable rather than simply choreographed. Skovgaard has always understood that the context around a collection changes how the clothes are received, that the atmosphere of a show seeps into how you see what is walking through it, and The Skovgaardettes benefited enormously from the care he put into making the whole experience feel like entering someone’s specific and lovingly constructed world rather than attending a runway presentation.
The Collection
The fabrics he chose said everything about the period reference before the silhouettes even registered. Gingham, crisp taffeta, and pastel floral jacquards, three materials that between them carry the entire visual and tactile memory of 1960s femininity, the cheerful domestic optimism of the gingham, the slightly formal occasion-wear quality of the taffeta, the romantic softness of the floral jacquard. But Skovgaard did not simply reproduce what those fabrics have always meant. He used them in silhouettes and proportions that pushed the period reference somewhere contemporary, the volumes larger and more sculptural than any original girl group costume would have been, the cuts more considered and more technically precise.
The palette moved through powder blue, pale pink, warm cream, and romantic florals, each color sitting within the same soft and slightly dreamy register without any of them competing for dominance. The palette did the work of making the collection feel unified even as each individual look was designed to feel like its own character within the group, its own specific Skovgaardette with her own personality and her own way of wearing the same shared aesthetic vocabulary. It is a subtle and effective internal logic, the kind that gives a collection variety without losing coherence, and it is one of the reasons Skovgaard’s work photographs so well as a complete lineup rather than only as individual standout pieces.
The circular-cut skirts were the collection’s defining silhouette and the one that carried the girl group reference most directly and most beautifully. Cut in full circles rather than gathered or pleated into a waistband, they moved with a swinging lightness that gathered fabric simply cannot replicate, the hem lifting and settling as the models walked in a way that gave the whole collection a kinetic quality, as though the clothes were performing as much as the models wearing them. Paired with fitted structured bodices and tops that balanced the volume below, the proportions felt considered and flattering rather than simply dramatic, which is the distinction that separates a designer with a genuine understanding of the body from one who is simply pursuing a visual effect. The gingham versions of the circular skirts were the clearest reference to the 1960s girl group world Skovgaard was building, but worn at the scale he chose and with the structural precision of the bodices above them they read as completely contemporary rather than costumey.
The taffeta pieces had a different quality, slightly stiffer and more occasion-inflected, the fabric holding its own shape and adding a formality to the looks it appeared in that the gingham and the jacquard did not quite have. There is something about taffeta that reads as dressed up regardless of the silhouette it is cut into, and Skovgaard used that quality deliberately, placing the taffeta looks at specific points in the lineup to shift the register of the collection toward something more celebratory, more ready for an actual performance rather than a rehearsal. The pastel floral jacquards were the softest and the most romantic of the three main fabrics, the pattern doing the decorative work that the structure of the gingham and the sheen of the taffeta achieved through surface and texture rather than print.
Photo via @nicklasskovgaard on Instagram
The accessories completed the picture without overcrowding it. Returning collaborations with HOFF sneakers and HVISK bags brought contemporary footwear and bag shapes into a collection built on 1960s references, the styling decision grounding the whole thing in the present rather than letting it tip into period costume, which is always the risk with this kind of historically specific concept. The sneakers in particular gave each look an ease and a wearability that pure period-faithful styling would have removed, a reminder that the Skovgaardettes, fictional as they are, exist in 2026 and dress accordingly.
What Skovgaard has been building since 2020 is a very particular kind of fashion brand, one where the theatricality and the conceptual ambition are always in genuine service of the clothes rather than competing with them. The Skovgaardettes could have been a concept so consuming that the gingham and the taffeta and the floral jacquards became props within it rather than the point of it, and that never happened. The vintage car arrival and the live True Blue performance and the fictional girl group backstory all created the world, but the circular-cut skirts and the structured bodices and the carefully considered proportions were the reason to care about that world. That balance is harder to maintain than it looks, and Skovgaard has been maintaining it every season since he started.