“I think our universe has been very floaty, and somehow I feel like this collection is grounding it but still in an elevated way.” So said Cecilie Bahnsen on a call about her pre-fall 2024 collection. It’s been four seasons since the Danish designer started expanding her offering in a distinctive way that makes sense for her brand. This time around, her pretty, romantic dresses mingle with confident separates, like an army green bomber with a bow back and pants and jackets made of stiff canvas and denim.
“It takes time to make [a new category] your own and to learn it,” the Danish designer explained. “For me, canvas and denim have a whole other weight to anything else that I do. You need to find a way of creating volume, creating details within that, and that takes a couple of seasons, and then you kind of get it right.” It feels like Bahnsen has now cracked the code, and that’s a plus for fans as it allows for different price points and ways to play with the aesthetic without necessarily going in for the full look.
Among the dichotomies at work in this collection are air and earth, expressed in terms of palette and the hand of the materials. The firmer fabrics introduce an element of geometry to complement the soft roundness of Bahnsen’s trademark poofy dresses. Hard is also played against soft, as in Look 8, a patent skirt worn with a bow-tie backward sweater.
Duality was the starting point for the season. It so happened that at Bahnsen’s spring show in Paris, two models who are sisters but live in different cities walked their first show together. They appear together again in the pre-fall look book, which got the designer thinking of how she felt during the 15 years she lived in a country different from her own sister. “Seeing them together,” she said, made her “reminisce about what sisterhood is, both for the brand and also for me.” Together but different (as siblings are) defines the way Bahnsen approaches the season. Pre-fall, the designer said, is a “balance between the couture-y and the romance and the kind of princess-y storytelling” as well as more down-to-earth pieces. Her aim is to “both be a realist but also still be the dreamer and still create beautiful things because I think we still need that. But,” she added, “I think it needs to be in a way where you also bring [the dream] into real life.” There’s more than one way to walk on sunshine, in other words.