There’s a scene in The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s biopic film documenting the lives of Danish painters Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener in the 1920s, where Lili (who was then known as Einar Wegener) poses for her wife in tights and pointed heels, to help her finish a portrait of a ballerina. The touching moment, in which Lili holds up a flared dress to her body, running her fingers across the silk garment’s seams, changed the painter’s life forever, spurring her to start dressing in women’s clothing, adopting the name Lili, and later becoming one of the first people to medically transition. In part, Gerda’s paintings of Lili throughout the process inspired Nicklas Skovgaard’s SS24 collection, a tribute to the art of dressmaking and the transformative power of clothing.
“I pinned up a lot of pictures that Gerda painted on my board because they have this fantasy to them, or [reflect] another dream-like state,” the 28-year-old designer says, two weeks before his runway debut at Copenhagen Fashion Week. “I felt a connection to [their story] because I make women’s clothes myself. I’d always see my mother dress up and had thoughts about how I would be dressing if I were dressed in womenswear.”
Nicklas was moved by the raw emotion in the paintings — the softness with which Gerda paints Lili’s features — and the idea that they were each other’s ultimate muses. With this in mind approaching his SS24 show, Nicklas looked to his own muse — the Amsterdam-based performance artist Britt Liberg — to give his latest collection new meaning. The pair met as many modern day creatives do, through Instagram, but it was “love at first sight”, Britt says. Nicklas had seen a performance of hers titled “The Fashion Show”, inspired by her love of clothing and experience as a model, in which Britt put on and took off an entire rack of clothes — buttoning up all the buttons, dramatically closing zippers or even marching around the stage half undressed, experimenting with how different garments sat on her body. “It just left me with this feeling,” Nicklas says. “I’d never experienced clothes in this way before.”
So, he sent her a box of his own designs to play with and their ongoing collaboration began. “Opening the box was like opening a dress up box as a child. So magical and full of inspiration,” Britt says. The pieces had intricate details — glittered fringe trims, bubble skirts, tied bonnets — and subsequently, a natural movement to them that translated well to her performance work. “Nicklas creates a dream world full of different characters,” she continued, “the clothes almost move on their own and as soon as you put them on you step into a different version of yourself.”
Nicklas first became interested in fashion through his mother, who trained with Jane Fonda in London in the 80s, and loved to dress up. “When I look at it now, she was playing a lot with her character through the way she dressed,” he says. She’d often take Nicklas shopping with her, where he’d take note of her preferences — how various silhouettes would fit, how they’d make her feel. These memories can be seen in Nicklas’ designs today, which push the boundaries of the female body beyond its intended form — accentuating but also manipulating natural shapes, subverting notions of what’s attractive, desirable — through sculpture, and the use of heavy, voluminous fabrics. He taught himself to sew in his early teens, purchasing old Vogue magazines — and even some well-creased copies of i-D that now sit in his studio — for inspiration from thrift shops across Denmark.
Growing up in a rural town on the island of Funen, Nicklas had a few friends that shared his interest in fashion — they’d trade the magazines back and forth, which would later inform their style blogs; his was simply called “My Clothing Blog”. But it wasn’t until the internet became widely available that the fashion industry felt within reach. “Growing up in the countryside, I felt that the other boys around were different than I was. They had different interests. So, for me, like, seeing a Chanel show on my small iPod video would be an escape,” he says. “Seeing this fantasy world [they created] through the show venue, the clothes, somehow you know you want to understand it or even be a part of it.”
Nicklas moved to Copenhagen when he was 18, where he started working as a freelance stylist, and later, doing interior styling for Hay. When he was on a summer holiday with his boyfriend, he saw an old loom sitting in the window of a thrift shop and decided to take it home with him. “I never tried using a loom before and it was super cheap, so I just tried using it,” he says. “It was just a fun, summer holiday kind of interest.”
The hobby stuck though. In 2020, Nicklas quit his job to start weaving full time, renting a studio from a friend during Covid lockdowns and working at the loom each day, eventually buying himself a larger machine. “That was the very rough start of wanting to create clothes, just using the loom as a primary tool and crafting my own fabric,” he says. Nicklas began making vests, skirts, the cropped wool jackets he’s since become known for; even in these early pieces, there’s an emphasis on silhouette and very tactile structure — simple cuts with a focus on unexpected materials like silk taffeta, thick jersey and velvet.
Working closely with his friends and the local community — the designer also used to style A. Roege Hove’s shows — Nicklas would post pictures of his friend Anna Ravn Lei in the looks on Instagram, often photographed by Claudia Vega. They all were part of a young generation of Danish fashion bloggers, and so Nicklas started quickly attracting attention on the app. A simple portrait of a model in a “classic cosy chic” draped dress or a mermaid-like sequinned balloon gown — shared amongst flicks of interiors and the Renaissance paintings that constantly inspire him — would reach editors, influencers and fashion fans worldwide. “Having people reaching out and showing interest in what I was doing, that really sparked the idea of shaping a brand,” Nicklas says.
It also attracted the attention of Copenhagen Fashion Week, who’ve been trying to get Nicklas on the schedule for the last couple years. Having not-so-quietly released six collections without a single runway show, Nicklas was certainly a match for the organisation’s NEWTALENT program, which the designer joined this season, as well as the Wessel & Vett Fashion Prize, which he was a finalist of in 2022. Previously, it “didn’t make sense” to show because Nicklas’ production didn’t match the hype. However now, as things are up and running — he sells his wares at local shop Holly Golightly and Cafe Forgot in New York, and hopefully major retailers this fall — it just felt right to show for SS24. “I had this feeling that it was now it should happen,” Nicklas says. “I wanted to take my garments and my collection out of Instagram and into the real world.”
The night before his runway debut Nicklas echoed what he’d said weeks before, that if he was going to show during CPHFW, it was going to be on his terms. Exactly how he wanted it to be. In a warehouse called TAP1, which he’d chosen for its spaciousness, Britt walked through the crowd of seated attendees in a sweeping trench coat. When she reached the front, the room fell silent as she slowly unbuttoned her coat to reveal a pair of frilled shorts and the curtains swung open behind her. She posed alongside 12 mannequins dressed in Nicklas Skovgaard SS24 — cropped short jackets, done in a new short-sleeve, T-shirt style for summer, paired with matching caps; baby pink and turquoise, tiered sequin dresses; a shirred, drop waist number with a metallic skirt and cape — mimicking their rigid, doll-like inflections, and drawing upon her years of ballet experience as she danced across the stage.
Over the course of 10 minutes, she dressed herself in nine looks from the new collection, zipping up a white lace buckled dress, twirling across the front row in a brown ribbed corduroy jacket and posing on a stool for her portrait; working her angles like a modern day royal. The collection was replete with dresses, as that’s what Nicklas enjoys designing most, and what he’d want to wear — “you put on one piece of [clothing], and it can tell you so much”, he says — while the colours and messaging of the garments called back to aristocracy dress, and Baroque and Renaissance artworks of the 1700s. “I see Nicklas’ work, and especially this new collection, as an exaggeration of myself,” Britt adds. “It makes me feel really powerful and fearless, but dreamy and romantic at the same time.”
In many senses, it wasn’t a fashion show at all — but what is a fashion show, even? Nicklas’ runway debut with Britt as the sole model, proves that not only can you pull off a captivating show on a shoestring budget, but you can stay true to yourself and your sartorial vision — becoming one of the most exciting shows of the week because of it. That’s the power of fashion, really; of clothes — the kind that are so powerful that playing dress up in them calls your entire identity into question. “I wanted people to leave the show feeling that they experienced the world of my clothes in a way,” Nicklas says, “and that they leave with a feeling of joy.” Indeed, they did.
Credits
Photography Claudia Vega