A melding of nature and man emerged from Birk Nielsen’s craggy scape
As the winner of last year’s Wessel & Vett Fashion Prize, Copenhagen Fashion Week’s talent incubator program, Iso.Poetism’s Tobias Birk Nielsen has been having a particularly good few months. Deemed by one of the award panellists to be “Danish fashion’s best-kept secret,” this notion proved to only ring true in today’s collection.
In amongst the floating stones and rubble of Iso.Poetism’s runway, models emerged to the haunting hum that filled up the entire venue of the city’s Bella Centre. Using the the dogma of bricolag (creating something new out of disused materials) the show’s natural-style set design, with its suspended boulders and apocalyptic-style wasteland, was entirely crafted from upcycled old box, newspapers and deadstock fabric.
“Since I was a kid, I’ve been collecting stones. It started as a modest hobby inherited from my sweet grandma. When beginning, it mainly had a focus around a visual attention, simply to find beautiful and unique shape and colours,” explains Tobias Birk Nielsen in the show notes.
The interspersing of nature and humanity is evident in Nielsen’s truly utilitarian Copenhagen Obsidian Society collection (13)* where the colour palette of rust brows, swampy greens and ashen greys could at once reflect the fragility and changing nature of the world around us and prove to be the perfect uniform for its very demise – with cropped boxy hoodies, puffer vests and ski masks crafted from technical fabrics. “An exploration of finding meaning, believe and substance through the knowledge of nature and it’s power of giving,” describes Birk Nielsen.
See the full collection below:
Iso.Poetism - AW23
