The future can be sensed at Stockholm Fashion Week
A pretender complained the other week in Dagens Nyheter that I sound like a scratched record. He is right. I have built my career on three opinions:
1. That I’m cool.
2. That the bourgeoisie it is not.
3. That fashion week sucks.
Let me at least revise opinion number three a bit.
In the essay collection “The unimportance of form and other arguments” argues the British furniture designer Jasper Morrison for the beauty of ordinary things: a chair. A mended college shirt. A bicycle handlebar. A safety pin. A bowl of couscous.
In the movement that began in the 1990s, where the traditional world of fashion lost cultural influence, Morrison’s ideas of simplicity Plant. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in the eighties and built a career in between Thatcher’s deindustrialization. The pure was the remaining reachable. His holy war was against decorum.
2026 is in the middle of Morrison’s world of thought. The only design left is the one that doesn’t look. The fashion industry’s almost perverse obsession with social media, as well as the shift from two to six or eight collections a year for the global fashion houses, created a space where silence became…well, fashionable.
This year’s edition of Stockholm Fashion Week is cut down and more local than I remember it. The amount of street style miffons at a manageable level, although the organizer ASFB, as usual, insists on trying to build international flair through the so-called idiot bus (fly-in press zombies who arrive exactly at the scheduled opening time).
Of course, Sensodyne is also one of the main sponsors.
Swedish fashion has met the same fate as the advertising industry: A former meeting place for creative geniuses and high representation accounts reduced to a comfort-optimized end station. But where the Golden Egg (a prize awarded to the country’s most complacent advertisers) is a funeral chapel for the time that fleetingly sketches Stockholm’s fashion week on a draft of something that at least resembles tomorrow.
The opening display of debutant Emily Gullbo – whose clothes are made by hand in naturally extracted latex – had given Jasper Morrison a stroke (transparent thongs have a limited use after all) but also rips open the rabbit hole that Swedish fashion has dug itself into.
The voyeuristic sexiness presented – Hitchcock rather than Pornhub – is kind of a negative of Tom Ford’s porn-damaged nerdiness, the one that made Gucci one of this century’s big revenue models. What we got to see was an alternative historiography in which the one with the best cock-sucker eyes for once lost the battle to be the queen of the fashion prom.
Kristofer Andersson is publishing manager, podcaster and writer at Aftonbladet Kultur.
