Beautiful arrangements of various shaped glasses filled with pink champagne and garnished with maraschino cherries greeted guests at Bonnetje’s show, the second of three supported by Copenhagen Fashion Week’s New Talent program. The curvy glasses and rosy hues were hints of what was to come.
Anna Myntekær and Yoko Maja Hansen, who are part of what might be dubbed the Hodakova generation, have built their brand around reworking—and eroticizing—men’s suiting. That’s something they’ll never abandon, but this season they wanted to expand their repertoire and to add a bit of color. To do so, they landed on the polar opposite of tailoring—lingerie. A slip, the designers noted, “is very, very intimate, but a suit is more like a shield you put on.” Underclothes were originally intended to be hidden; here Myntekær and Hansen brought them out from under in much the same way they make use of lining and construction materials that are not intended to be exposed.
Somehow a lace-trimmed slip always conjures Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 8; Liz by Andy Warhol also comes to mind when looking at some of the tweaks the designers applied to this wardrobe staple. For Bonnetje to grow as a business, some sort of balance must be achieved between concept and commercial concerns—an even 50/50 probably won’t differentiate the brand enough. As de- and re-constructed as the brand’s signature suiting, these dresses had an immediate, understandable appeal, though the sheer looks with flower embellishments were perhaps too pretty for their own good.
In a post-show chat the designers explained that they had refined their original theme, fragility, to the more specific idea of glass. (The soundtrack included the sound of breaking glass and models carried vintage glass objects, some of which had been transformed into bags by Matilda Venczel.) Glass, the designers noted, “can also be fluid, you can melt it and you can redo glass over and over again—and that’s what we do with the upcycled clothes we work with; we are trying to transform them into something fluid and that can break and then be repaired again.”
