Danish Fashion Institute

Since the sixties, Danish fashion has developed into one of the most successful Danish export industries. It contributes to Danish export, employment, and growth. The industry is outsourcing production operations, and Danish fashion companies have a higher shareholder value creation than any other fashion industry globally.
Numbers from Danish textile, clothes, footwear, and leather industries together indicate that fashion is the 4th largest Danish export business within the manufacturing industries, exporting worth more than DKK 30 billion per year.
In the sixties and seventies, Danish fashion experienced industrialization and democratization.

During the sixties, the Danish clothes export was really getting started. Between 1960 and 1965 the textile and clothes industries doubled their export from DKK 250 million to DKK 500 million. Denmark produced mainly fashion wear and specialized products, thus enabling the expression "the Danish fashion industry" to take hold.
The Danish industry was under pressure from the low salaries abroad and it was soon evident that focusing exclusively on technology and on boosting work process efficiency was not enough. If the industry was to keep growing, a focus on product development was required.

In this era the industry was also gaining more awareness in the population. This was the beginning of a Danish fashion industry and the phenomenon referred to as Danish fashion.
In the sixties, fashion was no longer just from Paris or even just created by haute couture designers. Fashion now also had a hotbed in the habits of young people, put into mass production by young fashion designers.
The most notable Danish designers were: Margit Brandt, Søs Drasbæk with the Dranella brand, Bent Visti, Mugge Kølpin, Lise-Lotte Wiingaard, Sysser Ginsborg with the Deres brand, and Kirsten Teisner with the InWear brand. Most of these designers were educated from Kunsthåndværkerskolen (today Danmarks Designskole) or Margretheskolen.

Through an added focus on design, the Danish fashion industry succeeded in convincing Danish consumers that Danish fashion wear was fully competitive with international fashion wear imported from abroad. This national success inspired a group of trend-setting designers to join forces and promote themselves abroad.
The styles of the clothes were correspondent to the contemporary Scandinavian design and furniture. Foreign markets could easily identify Danish fashion as also being the bearer of a Scandinavian identity. And in Denmark, the press backed the new popular fashion, domestically designed and produced.

The upturn of the Danish fashion industry began in the fifties and gained speed in the sixties, but already abated around 1975. This did not come as a surprise to the industry. Through the entire upturn seminars and periodicals had discussed how to come to terms with an ever increasing competition from abroad. Still it wasn't until the nineties that Danish fashion as a whole showed progress again.
This time it was companies like IC Companys, Brandtex and Bestseller, built around several strong brands, that pushed the commercial progress forward both nationally and internationally. The biggest markets of these companies are Scandinavia, Germany, Benelux, and China. In themselves and together with other Danish brands, these three companies are the biggest contributors to the current export success of Danish fashion.

Another reason for the success was the emergence of a handful of Danish designers who gradually made themselves visible internationally. Names like Ivan Grundahl and Jan Machenhauer were the first, and younger names like Munthe plus Simonsen, Bruuns Bazaar, Rützou, DAY Birger et Mikkelsen, and Mads Nørgaard took over where they left. Their success in turn allowed a flora of new designers to emerge. These designers rely on the avante-garde in both their expressions and styles, and in their approach to business. The most recent are people like Peter Jensen, Jens Laugesen, Henrik Vibskov, and Camilla Stærk.

The development of Danish fashion also means that not only the Danish press but also the Danish political life have taken an interest in fashion as a business. In a broader perspective, the fashion industry shows how Denmark can take the lead in a globalized world.
Encouraged by this success and driven by a group of players in Danish fashion, this lead to the establishment of a network organisation, Danish Fashion Institute, in the fall of 2005. The institute, so far financed by membership fees, has the primary task of promoting the growth and international awareness of Copenhagen Fashion Week.

By Marie Riegels Melchior/Ph.d.-stipendia