RENÈ DEBUTS AT Copenhagen fashion week WITH 'SEA MARKED'
Live cello, a whitewashed loft and a collection drawn from the water around the Danish isles. Renè made eleven in the morning feel like the right time to be moved. Gabriel Winter recalls the morning.
There is a particular kind of nerve involved in taking an eleven o'clock slot on the second morning of a fashion week and deciding that what the room needs is a cellist. Renè did exactly that, and it worked.
The venue was a working loft with a pitched roof, whitewashed brick, and rough timber posts left scarred and unpainted, the kind of Copenhagen space that has clearly been many other things first. Blue stacking chairs, two rows deep. Josefine Opsahl sat at the far end in gold, hair coiled high, and played through the entire show. She was not underscoring anything. She was performing, and the collection moved around her.
Jens Skov Østergaard and Kridpat Charoenchaipiyakul built this one for the seafarers, taking the tide of the Nordic coast, the waters that surround the Danish isles and the people who work them as the starting point. It arrived without any need for explanation. An early look came out in a wide, soft-brimmed hat and a sleeveless tabard in a mottled sand-grey cloth that looked salt-bleached, a cord fastening at the chest, worn over loose pale trousers. It read immediately as weather gear that had been thought about for a long time rather than borrowed for an afternoon.
From there, the collection moved between the very large and the closely cut, and the line held across both. Colour stayed washed and low. Texture carried the register. There was coherence in the run, a real sense of a house voice rather than a set of ideas competing, and the clothes moved the way the collection's subject does, fluid and unhurried and calm. Warmth is not a quality anyone associates with the North Sea, and Renè found it anyway.
The label was founded in Copenhagen in 2022 by Østergaard and Charoenchaipiyakul, who married the same year, and it is genderless by design. Its stated ambition is a conversation between Eastern and Western sensibilities, and the practical form that takes is restraint in the silhouette and obsessiveness in the finish. Renè works only in deadstock. Most of it comes from Danish interior stock, the rest from Japan and Italy, and everything is made in short runs with tailors and family ateliers rather than at volume. You can see that in the fabrics, which have the particular character of cloth chosen from what happened to exist rather than ordered from a book.
Copenhagen gave Renè one of three One To Watch slots this season, alongside SSON and Taus. And let us tell you, we will be watching everything this emerging brand releases from now on with a close eye.
