The starting point for every Bonnetje collection is the deconstruction of men’s suits and attire, to which a bit of kink is added somewhere along the line. As a result, Bonnetje’s core narrative is construction and fabric manipulation, which hasn’t always clearly come through on the runway. As Yoko Maja Hansen put it, their work “is more about a whole technique and a way of working and a way of looking at garments more than a story.” So, for their third and final season as part of CPHFW’s NewTalent program, Maja Hansen and Anna Myntekær returned to the presentation format, with which they introduced their brand in 2024.
For fall, the duo refined the best aspects from their previous work and honed them into something wonderful. In addition to mining their own archive, the designer friends came away from the recent “Surreal on Paper” exhibition at Copenhagen’s SMK museum, seeing similarities between that group’s game of exquisite corpse and their own way of working. “How we work,” Myntekær explained, is that “one [of us will] start on a garment and then give it further on, to Yoko, for example, and then it comes back [to me], which is a bit the same somehow.” (The Surrealists would create texts or images by having one person contribute something, fold the paper, and pass it on to the next person who would add to it.) Surrealism was most visually at play in the film Casper Sejersen created of the collection, and which, in a kind of variation on the exquisite corpse, the designer’s didn’t see until it was completed.
Repetition was very much in evidence for fall. One skirt was made from shirt cuffs attached to create an openwork textile; on a long dress they were overlapped and worked vertically. Tailoring was exaggerated into extreme forms with a pannier-like shape. (Shades of Marie Antoinette?) Taking, rather than eating, the cake were the shoes, particularly those adorned with dozens of plastic keychains which made a kind of music when in motion, and boots made of upcycled bags. These were show pieces, but the designers have a real knack for innovation, and with the right partner, accessories could become an important category for the brand.
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