Surrealist gowns made from deconstructed suits. Zero-waste weaving techniques that produce stretch without synthetics. Hand-braided leather honoring Bedouin heritage. Preppy knitwear crafted by Peruvian artisans preserving ancient techniques.
The AW 2026 edition of Copenhagen Fashion Week delivered fashion that excites, provokes, and demands attention—made by designers who refuse to accept that creativity requires waste or that beauty demands exploitation.
This matters more than ever. While the EU waters down its green legislation, France retreats from sustainability requirements, and the US abandons environmental commitments wholesale, Copenhagen Fashion Week pioneered mandatory sustainability criteria in 2020 and remains the standard-bearer, even as London has recently followed its lead.
The screening process sets baseline requirements around responsible production—and CPHFW is careful about what this means. Passing doesn’t make a brand “sustainable” or “eco-friendly.” It simply means they’ve met the admission criteria.
In this climate, a platform that still asks brands what they’re actually doing feels almost defiant. These designers answered with work that makes responsibility look like the future it should be.
Stem
Sarah Brunnhuber’s Stem operates on a principle that sounds almost too good to be true: zero-waste woven garment production. The Copenhagen-based brand, founded in 2021, has developed a proprietary weaving, cutting, and sewing technique that eliminates production waste entirely. Shape, pattern, and function are embedded directly into the fabric during the weaving process, leaving seams and fringes visible as evidence of the garment’s construction. For autumn/winter 2026, Brunnhuber titled the collection To Wool—both an ode to the fibre and a verb suggesting action. The innovation at the heart of this season was Elastic Wool, a high-twist yarn that behaves like stretch fabric without synthetic additives, developed over several years and now translated into industrial production. The wool itself was sourced from a Danish shepherd and spun locally. The colour palette—navy, off-white, brown—emerged from the deadstock yarns available in the required quality and quantity, a constraint Brunnhuber embraced rather than fought. Form follows technique here, and the results are quietly revolutionary.
Why it’s No Kill: because it eliminates waste at the structural level, not after the fact, and treats materials as collaborators rather than resources to be extracted.
Taus
Founded in 2024 by Freyja Taus and Juho Lehiö, Taus approaches fashion as dialogue rather than novelty. The Copenhagen studio produces ready-to-wear and demi-couture pieces rooted in craftsmanship and slowness, with each garment hand-sewn in their local atelier over a period of months. Their commitment to upcycled materials is rigorous: the autumn/winter 2026 collection incorporated discarded home textiles turned backside-up for texture, as well as suits from Lehiö’s late grandfather.
Aesthetically, the collection channeled darkly romantic femininity and unapologetic self-expression, drawing inspiration from early 20th-century queer history in Berlin—particularly the progressive communities that existed before their destruction by the Nazi regime. This was Taus’s first runway show after two seasons of presentations, and the slow, deliberate pace invited audiences to truly consider garments made to last.
Why it’s No Kill: because it rejects overproduction, centers labor and time, and insists that clothing can carry meaning without becoming disposable.
Bonnetje
Anna Myntekær and Yoko Maja Hansen founded Bonnetje after graduating from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, bringing experience from Cecilie Bahnsen and Maison Margiela respectively. The brand’s concept is deceptively simple: cut up old suits and reassemble the pieces into new silhouettes. In practice, this means sleeves appear where collars should be, buttons migrate to unexpected locations, and menswear is transformed into feminine, avant-garde forms.
For autumn/winter 2026, the designers leaned into surrealism, studying how artists like René Magritte and Max Ernst employed repetition and strange symbols. A dress constructed entirely from white tank tops. A gown fashioned from shirt cuffs. Pumps adorned with vintage keychains that jingled against the presentation’s live piano soundtrack. Despite the conceptual complexity, the silhouettes remain wearable—classic shapes relocated.
Why it’s No Kill: because it works entirely with defunct materials, treating reuse as a design language rather than a limitation, and proving that upcycling can be intellectually and aesthetically rigorous.
Paolina Russo
Paolina Russo continues to prove that responsible production can coexist with joy, color, and exuberance. For autumn/winter 2026, they presented a collection inspired by the first school trip taken outside one’s hometown—that feeling of possibility when the world suddenly expands. Uniforms became a vehicle for individuality rather than conformity, with pleated skirts, rugby stripes, and collegiate crests reimagined in clashing pastels and neon pops.
We are fans of the brand’s material commitments: the collection featured mono-fibers (100 percent wools, 100 percent cottons) and graphics laser-etched directly into denim and corduroy rather than printed. More significantly, they collaborated with local artisans in Peru through Maison Anaychay, a French Peruvian creative studio that connects designers with craftspeople specializing in ancient embroidery and crochet techniques. This partnership provides women with living wages while allowing them to work from home caring for their families, sustaining traditional skills into the future.
Why it’s No Kill: because it sustains craft communities, prioritizes natural and monofibers, and refuses the false choice between responsibility and delight.
Nazzal Studio
Sylwia Nazzal made history at Copenhagen Fashion Week as the first Palestinian designer to show at the event. Her brand, Nazzal Studio, exists at the intersection of fashion, ethics, and activism, with Palestinian heritage and resistance at its core. The autumn/winter 2026 collection, Al-Najah (Survival), drew inspiration from Bedouin traditions—the knowledge of how people survived and found purpose in some of the world’s most unforgiving landscapes. Working alongside contemporary artist Jad Maq, Nazzal incorporated Bedouin tattoo motifs and Palestinian Tatreez symbols using natural henna dye. Buttery leather and undyed natural latex—fabricated by the designer and her collaborator themselves—formed lofty, Bedouin-inspired silhouettes. An elaborate braiding technique requiring days to complete a single piece added texture to hooded jackets and relaxed tailoring.
At the heart of the process was community: Palestinian refugee women hand-wove macramé pieces resembling traditional jewellery, scaled up dramatically. Staged at The David Collection, home to Scandinavia’s largest collection of Islamic art, the presentation honored heritage while championing the economic empowerment of displaced artisans.
Why it’s No Kill: because it centers marginalized voices, prioritizes community over scale, and uses fashion as a vehicle for cultural preservation rather than extraction.
SSON: One to Watch
Swedish brand SSON made its Copenhagen Fashion Week debut as a One to Watch—a designation for emerging labels not yet screened against CPHFW’s minimum standards but introduced to the framework’s expectations. Co-founded by creative director Yulia Kjellsson and Ellinor Håkansson in 2024, SSON works exclusively with secondhand materials, sourcing from charity shops that cannot sell their overflow of donated textiles.
The autumn/winter 2026 collection, titled The Fortunate Ones, confronted this excess head-on. A mountain of discarded clothes dominated the presentation space, a literal monument to overconsumption. The garments themselves emerged from this abundance: a jacket fashioned from multiple fur-lined hoods, a skirt draped from V-neck sweaters. Some pieces were constructed intuitively from intact garments; others followed traditional pattern methods. This tension between instinct and system mirrors the broader uncertainty around sustainability itself.
SSON offers no easy answers or performative eco-purity—just the discomfort of acknowledging fashion’s waste problem while still producing. The resulting pieces, however, feel considered, functional, and genuinely wearable.
Why it’s No Kill: because it confronts overproduction head-on, refuses performative purity, and demonstrates that honesty and wearability can coexist.
January 2026 reaffirmed why Copenhagen Fashion Week remains a critical site for fashion that wants to mean something without pretending to be resolved. The brands highlighted here do not offer utopias. They offer process, care, refusal, and rigor. They remind us that responsibility is not a look, but a practice—and that aesthetics are sharpened when designers are willing to engage seriously with how and why clothing is made.
In a landscape increasingly hostile to accountability, that insistence matters. And for No Kill, it is exactly where fashion becomes worth paying attention to again.
All photos ©James Cochrane, courtesy CPHFW
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