The thing that makes Copenhagen different from the other four is not on the schedule at all. Every brand on the main schedule, the two debutants included, has to clear the same sustainability requirements as the labels that have been on the calendar for years. The guest slot is the exception. Collina Strada did not have to meet them. That rule is why a week this small gets watched at all. It shows up on the pavement too, because a city that screens its designers for reuse ends up with an audience that rewears things.

The clothes worth looking at are mostly outside the venues. That is truer here than anywhere else on the calendar. H! Fashion’s editor Clare Pennington calls Copenhagen the predecessor to the Big Four, and says the street draws as much attention as the runway.

Day one went to the shoes, which were strange enough to become the first confirmed trend of the season. The rest of the coverage settled on things people actually wear: eyelet, colour against colour, crochet with sportswear.

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The Shoes

The word going round for it is Mandy Lee’s: freaky shoes. Refinery29’s writer, filing from outside the STEM SS27 show on the first morning, described weaving through the crowd and thanking her freaky shoe oracle for the phrase. They are bright, they are shaped wrong on purpose, some of them divide the toes, and a few are two different shoes stitched into one. For a city with a reputation built on lace and gingham, that is a swerve, and it happened on the opening day.

The heeled flip-flop and the tabi are the versions with legs beyond this week, one a thong and the other split at the toe. A pair of tabis turned up under gargantuan shorts and a slogan t-shirt. In both, the strangeness sits at the front of the foot, in the place a shoe usually says nothing at all. Ordinary flip-flops are still everywhere in between.

Whether anybody can walk in the heeled ones is a separate question, and the answer is in a patent filing written by somebody who had clearly tried. A thong hangs on the foot at three points, and one of them is a post you grip with your toes. The thinner the post, the harder you have to grip, and the harder you grip, the sooner you blister. Loose straps flap and tight ones rub. Now raise the heel, which tips your weight forward onto exactly that post. Copenhagen is a cycling city and the guests were mostly photographed standing still.

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The Shorts

Bermuda shorts were out in every colour, and camo jorts were all over the street. One pair was simply gargantuan, and that is the direction things are going: past the knee and wide through the leg.

If you want to try this and you have never worn shorts that big, the top has to shrink. Wear a slogan tee, or a knit that fits, or a plain shirt.

The pairs on the street this week were long, and length changes what you need from the waistband. The leg has to hang from somewhere. A short cut to sit below the knee needs a deeper rise than one that stops at mid-thigh. A low waistband under a knee-length leg gives you a rectangle with no waist in it.

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The Jorts

Camo jorts run from t-shirt money to coat money. At the bottom of the range you are buying a pair of jeans with the legs cut off. That is a description of the process rather than a slur, and the process leaves marks. Almost all jeans taper through the thigh, including the ones sold as straight leg. So the hem of a cut-off cannot lie flat until somebody opens the side seams at the bottom and restitches them. A short cut as a short has that allowance in the pattern and its seams run clean to the edge. The hem stitch differs too, because a factory sets a long straight stitch to match the topstitching on the fly and the pockets, and a hem added later rarely matches.

Higher up, the cloth itself starts costing money, and what you are paying for is unevenness. Denim fades along the pale vertical streaks in the warp, and those streaks are slubs, the thick places in the yarn. Even yarn fades evenly. Open-end spinning produces yarn that is consistent, which is the one thing denim should not be, and it took over because it is faster and cheaper. Until the late 1970s all denim yarn was ring spun and came out uneven and full of them.

Mills chase the look with the Amsler attachment, bolted onto an open-end frame to put slubs back into consistent yarn, and the trade calls the output faux ring-spun. The device has a floor, though. A rotor cannot make a slub shorter than its own circumference, roughly ninety millimetres, while a ring-spun slub can be as short as a single fibre, about thirty. So the fake comes out as long streaks at regular intervals, and the real cloth scatters them, short and long.

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Crochet

Crochet caps are back, again. The best version this week was on a guest called Evi, outside the OpéraSport show. An aquamarine crochet top over Adidas trousers, silver beaded headpiece, oversized yellow leather bag, cream flip-flops. I count four of the week’s trends on one person, and the crochet is the piece holding it together. The open holey texture wants something flat against it, and a track pant is about as flat as clothing gets. Another guest did the same trick with a cream crochet headscarf and a matching co-ord.

Crochet cannot be made by machine, and not for want of anybody trying. The reason sits in the stitch. Knitting keeps a whole row of live loops sitting on a needle, and a machine can hold those and move them. Crochet has one live loop, ever. The hook goes into stitches that are already finished, from whatever direction the pattern asks, and a person judges the tension by hand as it goes. No machine does that. The ones sold as crochet machines make trims and chain stitch.

So every crochet cap in Copenhagen this week was made by a person, or it was not crochet. The second kind is warp knitting dressed up, and the trade calls it crochet-look.

Turn a crochet piece inside out. A hand-crocheted back looks nothing like its front and still makes complete sense, because the side you are looking at is the side somebody worked on. The edge is simply the last round they did. The other kind has loose ends and an overlocked edge, because it was cut out of a roll like any other cloth.

That is why it shows up as caps rather than dresses. A cap takes a few hours to make, so a real one lands at a price people will pay for a cap. Anything larger at chain-store money is a warp knit, and it will go out of shape at the shoulders inside a season.

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Eyelet

Eyelet is the same thing as broderie anglaise, and almost everybody files it under lace, which it is not. A lace is openwork built entirely out of thread, with nothing solid between the holes. Eyelet starts as a solid woven cloth with the holes cut or punched into it, and every hole is bound with overcast or buttonhole stitching so the cut edge cannot fray. The stitched rim is what keeps it opaque and holding its shape where a lace hangs sheer, and it is the part a printed version does not have. Almost all eyelet on sale is machine embroidered, and a machine binds the hole as well as a hand does.

The blouses turned up from day one, outside OpéraSport. They did not arrive from nowhere. Scandinavian street style has been working through lace for several seasons, most visibly as the wrap skirt, and the blouse is that same appetite moving up the body. What is more telling is what left to make room: the ribbed tank, the white button-down and the oversized t-shirt, which is what this crowd was photographed in a year ago. One guest wore a lilac puff-sleeve blouse with a white maxi skirt, a white lace headscarf, a turquoise shoulder bag and white socks under cream sneakerinas. Another was pregnant, in a lace set from H&M with & Other Stories kitten heels and Emmanuelle Khanh sunglasses, and had put coloured gems on the bump. Both are high-street buys.

Eyelet has been in production for centuries, and the lace-and-gingham reputation the city is currently swerving away from was built on exactly this.

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The Colour

Aqua blue is the colour of the week. Red keeps turning up as a single note against otherwise plain outfits. Mint green turned up with warm grey, and somebody put a cobalt blue t-shirt with a black pencil skirt.

Clashing prints are running alongside all of it. Other cities pick the habit up from Copenhagen late.

Inside the venues the same thing was happening. Of the shows that drew most notice in the first half of the week, Ganni was being talked about for its palette, Henrik Vibskov for staging, Stine Goya for prints. That is a fair description of what the pavement outside was already wearing.

Underneath the individual outfits the rule is the same: one thing is loud and the rest is quiet. Either a single colour does the work, or two colours that should not sit together get put together, and everything else stays out of the way.

The reason it looks easy in Copenhagen and hard everywhere else is the light. August there runs cool and grey more often than not, and a strong colour against a grey street reads as a decision. The same aqua under a hard summer sun goes chalky, and the same red goes orange.

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Everything Else

Fringing ran right through the week. The version that kept getting photographed was a fringed skirt with a fringed bag, which should not work and did.

The hats have a traceable cause. Simone Rocha, Saint Laurent, Dilara Findikoglu and Rory William Docherty all showed headwear in their Spring/Summer 2026 runways last year. What turned up on Copenhagen’s pavements this week is that filtering down: pillbox shapes and headscarves.

A fringe on denim is not added, it is left behind: the indigo warp standing exposed once somebody has pulled the white weft out, thread by thread. An unfinished edge keeps going, and without a line of straight stitching above the fringe the hem climbs, wash after wash, until the length has gone.

Bags split the crowd in two. Half the street was carrying a supersized slouchy clutch, which holds a phone and a lipstick and announces that you are not carrying anything else. The other half had a roomy tote, because somebody has to bring the laptop. Almost nobody wore a knit properly: they were tied at the shoulders or knotted at the waist, and lightweight jackets went over crisp shirting rather than onto arms.

On the head scarves you can tell a hand-rolled hem at the edge: the stitches are tiny and slightly uneven, and the hem disappears into the silk. A machine-serged edge draws a hard line round the design instead.

Worn over a dress or a pair of trousers instead of over swimwear, a pareo gives you a second length and a second colour without a second garment. It packs into nothing. A Copenhagen August runs cool enough that most people are carrying an extra layer anyway.

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Four Looks

The easiest one to steal was outside Stine Goya: black flip-flops, a white head scarf, a red and white striped top and a white skirt. Stripes under a head scarf sit one step away from a costume of a French holiday, and keeping everything else plain is what holds this one on the outfit side of the line. Even the bag and the sunglasses stay black.

Outside Herskind, a guest arrived in a yellow track jacket over a powder blue leather skirt. The skirt is the working part: the leather is glossy enough to throw light back at the yellow, which is why the colour reads bright instead of thin. She finished it with black strappy heels and a Louis Vuitton Papillon bag.

RUSSH picked a cherry red funnel-neck jacket out of the crowd, thrown over a summer dress with the rest left plain. The write-up called it letting “one bold colour do the talking.” Of the four this is the one that survives a normal week, and the reason is the funnel neck: it puts a hard circular line at the throat, which is what makes the jacket look deliberate over a soft dress.

The last one is the gargantuan shorts from earlier, cut past the knee and worn with a slogan t-shirt and tabis. At the knee they would just read as shorts that are too big, but past it they read as a length. And the tee has to sit close and stop at the waistband, or the whole outfit is nothing but fabric from the shoulders to the shins.

Out of the four, this rack gets you furthest on the last one: a slogan tee over three-quarter jorts covers everything but the tabis. The first look’s stripe is here too, as a breton long sleeve in blue and white or black and white, though not in red. There is no funnel neck and no pale blue leather on the shelves, so the middle two stay photographs.

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What to Buy

Start with the eyelet blouse. It is the cheapest way into the week, and one look at a hole from the wrong side settles whether it was made properly. The cloth is opaque between the holes and open at them, so the slip is part of the outfit: close to your own colour it disappears into the cloth, a contrasting one turns every hole into a dot of that colour, and no slip at all reads as underwear.

After that, buy the shorts before the shoes. A pair of Bermudas in a plain colour will still be right next summer and the one after. The freaky shoe is the loudest thing in Copenhagen this week and the first thing that will date the photographs.