The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Nordic chic
It’s time for a wardrobe reboot, Scandinavian style, so meet the designers changing the way everyone, including the Duchess of Cambridge, dresses. By Kate Finnigan
The hottest Scandinavian designers, as selected by Kate Finnigan and the Telegraph fashion team
Back in the 1960s and ’70s Scandinavian fashion meant the bold, primary-coloured prints of t he Finnish label Marimekko. In the 1980s Marc O’ Polo was t he S wed i sh- Ger ma n smart-casual brand of choice for the y uppie about town. Then, in t he 1990s, boutiques and upscale department stores made a pre-Scandi noir killing with feminine bohemian Danish desig ns by Day Birger et Mikkelsen and, later, By Malene Birger. In the noughties you could not call yourself a hipster without a pair of skinny black jeans by Cheap Monday.
Over the decades the desig n kudos of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and their neighbours has been amalgamated in our minds to become something amorphous yet distinctive that we now know as ‘Scandi style’. It is an aesthetic that traverses the chunky Faroe Islands hand-knit of The Killing ’s protagonist Sarah Lund and the sharp and luxurious leather biker jackets that have been bestsellers for the Stockholm-based label Acne Studios, an international player that shows its collections during Paris fashion week.
In recent years scores of Scandinavian fashion houses have broken through – there are whole boutiques devoted solely to labels from the region. Scandi style is in, and there are hundreds of popular Instagram accounts and street-style stars to prove it.
Scandinavia has also made an indelible print on our wardrobes via the high street. In 2014 the Swedish multinational H&M Group was valued at €13 billion, the highest-valued fashion brand in Europe. It owns not only H&M – the chain of afordable fashion stores dressing men, women and children, which continues to have success with its sell-out desig ner collaborations – but also Cheap Monday; Cos (Collection of Style), the discreet chain that brought to its customers high-street versions of Japanese avant-garde and minimalist European desig ners; the trend-led & Other Stories; and the younger-apparel brand Monki, serving the mercurial moods of teenagers. Elsewhere, the John Lewis in-house clothing label Kin is nothing if not an homage to Scandinavian styling.
From experimental streetwear to princess-appropriate dresses, Scandinavia’s contemporary fashion ofering is unarg uably eclectic. Here are the seven labels defning Nordic style right now.