The Danish fashion week makes fashion history with its strict sustainability requirements
nNew year, new fashion weeks. Or fashion months, if you will. Already at the end of January, it is ready for a new round with the Danish fashion week before the baton is passed on internationally and the really big fashion cities have their turn.
But this time, fashion history will be written when fashion week gets underway in the Danish capital.
– Have a round of shopping stops. No one has died from it.
At the beginning of 2020, the Danish fashion week is launching a set with strict sustainability requirements which applies to all brands that will show under the fashion week umbrella.
Broadly speaking, it is about a general minimum requirement that focuses on sustainability when it comes to both strategy, design, choice of materials, social responsibility, diversity and inclusion as well as design and display.
This season, the requirements are fully implemented – and the famous eye of the needle has thus become even narrower.
– For us, sustainability is the key, says managing director of Copenhagen Fashion Week, Cecilie Thorsmark to KK.
– As a fashion week, we are an important part of the fashion system since we bring together influential actors with different backgrounds from different parts of the world, she adds.
They are the target group everyone wants to reach
– Together we have a strong voice and influence the culture around fashion. Thus, having sustainability on the agenda will help create various changes in the industry.
It is Thorsmark who must take much of the credit for putting sustainability high on the agenda for the Danish fashion week.
In 2020, she will launch an extremely ambitious three-year plan that will make everyone look at Denmark, and which will secure her a place on the industry website Business of fashion its prestigious list of the fashion industry’s most important and influential voices.
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– I am so impressed by how dedicated brands have been when it comes to doing what is necessary to meet the sustainability requirements (and documenting them), writes Thorsmark on his Instagram profile just weeks before it breaks loose in Copenhagen.
– And I can hardly wait to kick off this new era of Copenhagen Fashion Week on January 31, together with 29 incredible and admirable brands, she tells KK.
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But it can’t be easy to have to turn around. Because even though sustainability has been central to a whole counter world in the last few years, it’s a lot of talk and little handling.
– For us, the most difficult goal was probably to reduce our carbon footprint by 50 percent, says Thorsmark.
Around 90 percent of the event’s emissions originate from the guest program.
– But as an international event and industry platform, it is important that we continue to invite and host high-profile editors and buyers. It is also a part for continuing to grow and for international positioning.
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I collaborate with both fashion week in Copenhagen and Norwegian Fashion Hub now also runs Oslo Runway, where she has some minimum criteria for brands that will show their collections in the future.