The new fashion graduates want a sustainable future

On Monday 6 August, 14 fashion candidates from the Royal Danish Academy presented their graduation show in Østerbro. The show was part of Copenhagen Fashion Week 2024 and unveiled the new designers' innovative and hopeful visions for future fashion. The show featured a wide range of designs: from ball gowns to combat uniforms to tailored mourning dresses.

The collections presented the newly trained designers' ideas about the world of tomorrow and suggested alternative narratives for a more responsible future. This was also the underlying ideological theme that tied the collections together: the designers all strive to make clothes that really matter and can make us hope and dream. Something the world seems to need right now.

The embedded cultural values of fashion

The graduates have been involved in various wardrobe studies and explored people's relationship with their clothes. How do you understand local culture, cultural heritage and how do you identify with a garment? Can you get people to care for their clothes, not just for one season but for years? Many have been curious about how to produce locally and how to reinvent craftsmanship skills in Denmark. Several of the designers have been engaged in gender issues and in the transformative power of fashion, for example by playing with symbols of power embedded in clothes and giving them new meanings by deconstructing them.

"By creating garments that is rooted in the emotional and cultural understanding of cloth, the designers are pointing to a more responsible future for the fashion industry, that is not only by handling materials sustainably - but also by pointing to the important role of the cultural values imbedded in fashion and what it means to the end user." says associate professor and head of KLOTHING - Center for Apparel, Textiles & Ecology Research at the Royal Academy, Else Skjold.