Rolf Ekroth’s plan to move his collection from a runway show in Copenhagen to a dance party/presentation in a techno club in Paris went up in smoke just weeks before the start of the men’s season. Things going up in flames was on his mind during the creation of these pieces (the collection included a “pyro” T-shirt and electric candles) which makes one wonder if there was a play-with-fire-and-get-burned scenario. But Ekroth, who was once a professional poker player, knows from odds and when to fold ’em: he decided “that it would be better to live and fight for another day.”
The designer, who Zoomed in from his cramped atelier in Helsinki, attached a personal note to his collection text, acknowledging that the combination of operating on a shoestring while trying to take in current events (Finland amd Russia share a long border) was overwhelming. This is a sensation he is also experiencing existentially and physically as the ever growing cartons and racks of clothing further cage him in his showbox-sized atelier. “I feel like every season the space for me to move here is getting smaller and smaller, and in a weird way I feel like all of the old stuff that I’ve done owns me and I wanted to get rid of it. The idea was, jokingly, that I would love to just light the match and put everything in flames and then move on with my life and come up with something new,” he explained. “But then chewing on that idea, I gained a new perspective on the old pieces, and I decided to rework them.”
In the past, Ekroth has sometimes gotten mired when excavating his past through nostalgia; this season’s more material approach, with the designer editing and expanding on existing patterns, found him in phoenix mode. The tight edit underlined the brand’s strengths, particularly the active/outerwear component. The designer returned to the sleeping bag designs that had performed so well and found a way to make them thinner and lighter than a feather using a sustainable, non-avian alternative. These were cut into a jumpsuit, wrap skirt, and coats used as underlayers.
Wild pattern clashes and mixes, like a plaid paired with an abstract camo print or checks with florals, appeared throughout, as did extreme widths. Ekroth created these with pleats on wide-leg pants, and conjured the effect of width by hanging gloves on trousers at hip level. He also revisited the detachable scarf panels he used for fall 2025.
It often feels like the world is burning of late, but the sense of purpose, preparedness, and protection in this collection was balanced with playfulness. That came through in the use of detachable gloves, a system, Ekroth explained, that is known to every Finnish child. Like Pyro, the cartoon cat character developed for this season, caps were eared. The final look, made using an intricate knotting technique, was executed by Ekroth’s most constant collaborators, his mother and father. It consisted of a cat hat/mask and an openwork sweater with hand-applied fringe in the shape and colors of a flame. It was lit.
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