Cecilie Bahnsen: Silhouette Of Summer

The silhouette is instantly recognisable: billowing, layered, textured. There is an evocative romance, and immense craftsmanship, to Cecilie Bahnsen’s designs that never fail to delight. This season, Bahnsen brings them down to earth, to how they’re worn in the everyday, finding beauty in asymmetry - the way a sleeve is rolled up, or a skirt hitched - challenging “variations of femininity.” 

“It is really the beauty of the everyday, like the way you tuck up the dress when you go on your bike or roll up your sleeves to protect them when you’re working and these different kinds of drapes and folds accidentally happen,” she says. “These small accidents that change the silhouettes are just so beautiful and can inform so many new ideas, which was really the starting point this season.”

In addition to a familiar pastel colour palette, Bahnsen introduces hot pops of red and orange for summer - a nod to the collection’s name “My Heart Is Pounding.” More newness comes in the form of a line of tote bags, created in partnership with Japanese brand Chacoli, and New York-based artist Megumi Shauna Arai. Crafted using leftover bonded cotton fabric with stitch floral embellishments, the totes comes in a variety of colours, from neutrals to navy and yellow, and are the optimum size for running around the city, or packing for the beach, this summer.

Working with leftover fabrics is common practice at Cecilie Bahnsen, who put every last scrap of material left from previous seasons into the upcycled “Encore” collections released throughout the year. Each piece is made-to-order in the brand’s new Copenhagen studio, with the production time at 6 weeks from order date.