Underground Elegance: What’s Brewing at CIFF 65

AUGUST 11, 2025
WORDS BENJAMIN SCHIFFER

Every August, Copenhagen Fashion Week spills into the streets—runways in grand old buildings, bikes streaming past models on smoke breaks, cafés doubling as meeting rooms. But just outside the center, at the Bella Center, sits CIFF—Copenhagen International Fashion Fair—the engine room of the week. It’s where collections are touched, tried on, discussed, and, just as often, discovered.

For three days, CIFF turns its cavernous exhibition halls into a fashion city-within-a-city. There are polished booths from established names, but also corners where things are looser, stranger, riskier. This season—the fair’s 65th edition — came framed in the theme “A Walk in the Park”. Not a polite stroll, but a collision of controlled and untamed: installations of wildflowers breaking through concrete, poppy red splashed against minimal backdrops, and nature creeping into the curated.

That mood suited the kind of designers CIFF excels at championing—those willing to test silhouettes, blend genres, and treat elegance as something to be redefined. This season, four collections in particular stood out for pushing the conversation forward.

RAVE REVIEW

In the vaulted calm of Nikolaj Kunsthal, Rave Review presented “Blommornas Makt” (“Power of Flowers”), a richly layered meditation on beauty, memory, and protest. Designers Livia Schück and Josephine Bergqvist drew on Swedish counterculture and 1960s feminist collectives, using the flower not as a motif but as a symbol with political weight. Vintage bed linens became sharply tailored jackets; sheer overlays floated above gingham skirts; silhouettes borrowed from traditional festival dress were anchored with customized PUMA sneakers. The effect was romantic, but never naive—nostalgia sharpened into armour.

OpéraSPORT

At Frederiksberg Badene, OpéraSPORT distilled the contrasts of Seoul—its harmony of past and present—into a collection of sculptural delicacy. Hanbok-inspired shapes met minimalist tailoring, vegan leather trenches bloomed with embroidered hibiscus, and airy lace was cut into architectural lines. The palette—butter yellow, sage, powder pink—felt like sunlight diffused through water. In an unexpected twist, their collaboration with Havaianas debuted the world’s first 3D-printed flip-flop, merging centuries-old silhouettes with future-forward craft.

BERNER KÜHL

Berner Kühl brought quiet discipline to CIFF’s more experimental spaces. For SS26, founder Frederik Berner Kühl reduced each look to its essentials: crisp cottons, dry wools, seams placed with surgical precision. The result was gender-fluid tailoring without slogan or spectacle, workwear reframed as minimal armour. In a season of bold gestures, Kühl’s restraint read as a statement in itself—an argument for elegance built on clarity.

7 DAYS ACTIVE

7 DAYS Active approached the season with a different form of elegance—one rooted in movement. Their SS26 collection, “Body Mind Soul”, offered performance wear that read as considered as any evening look: strap bras, half-zip fleeces, running jackets in deep cobalt, black, and white. The brand’s mantra, Movement is Therapy, ran through each piece, designed to move seamlessly from gym to street, from exertion to recovery. It was sportswear sharpened to a conceptual edge.