This season, Ganni’s creative director Ditte Reffstrup traced the spark back to something personal: a poem. An avid reader, she had been revisiting the Danish writer Inger Christensen and her miniature meditation “The Water Tree.” Short enough to read between fittings, the poem nevertheless sent her mind drifting north, to the blustery fishing community where she grew up, a place where the wind rarely takes a day off.
That landscape, she said, engineered her personality. It bred toughness, certainly, but also a fine-tuned sensitivity to nature’s more fragile, vulnerable moods. The women around her—mother, sisters, the whole formidable coastal sisterhood—embodied this same duality: equal parts steel and sea mist. Naturally, that tension became the collection’s emotional backbone.
For a cultural shorthand, Reffstrup invoked Björk, patron saint of poetic intensity. A first trip to Iceland sealed the comparison: here was another creative force who can whisper like falling snow and then, moments later, rearrange tectonic planes with her voice. At the presentation, the philosophy materialized into clothes with softness and a sense of purpose. Wisps of lace, pretty trims, fluttering hems and liquid fabrics played nicely with more grounded pieces: structured denim, hefty textures, blanket-worthy layering and silhouettes with actual backbone.
Romance was not in short supply. There were ruffles (many), flounces (plenty), tiered dresses, nods to crinoline and doily-like lace inserts scattered over crisp white cotton pinafores. But just as the sweetness threatened to float off, in came the pragmatic Danish reality check: tweeds, chunky knits and sensible heft. One suspects that somewhere along the windswept reverie, Wuthering Heights may have slipped onto Reffstrup’s reading list.
