Backstage at Sia Arnika’s spring 2026 present, a meditation on the stress between the clothed and unclothed physique, what with its lingerie, t-shirting, and shirting, all of which contained, and concurrently didn’t, the human kind, there was no moodboard, no assemblage of images, no evocation of stylistic previous glories, to pore over. As an alternative, what this Danish designer, who has proven in Berlin since she moved right here from Copenhagen 12 years in the past, supplied was a deeply private coming of age narrative that she’d constructed her assortment round, one knowledgeable by life expertise, her youth rising up in rural Denmark, in all their uncooked and tender and delightful glory.
Arnika had additionally been fascinated about an autobiographical brief story by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgard that she’d not too long ago learn, which targeted on the awkwardness of courting, and intercourse, and looking for your self in that mythic nation everyone knows as maturity. “It’s this complete factor of, ‘Who am I?’” Arnika stated. “I need to be any person I’m not.” She’d then alighted on the cultish 1970 film, A Love Story (to not be confused with the McGraw/O’Neal automobile of an identical classic and close to an identical identify) by director Roy Anderson, one other story of youthful sexual awakening, this one hailing from Sweden.
This all, stated Arnika, led her to consider the large feelings of youth, and the way they’ll coloration your grownup life. Additionally, not simply the feels, however what you put on; how we will get it unsuitable once we’re younger and inexperienced at life, making an attempt to determine how we need to gown and look—and the way you may generally need to revert again to it, as a result of, what the hell, some days you simply get up feeling that method. Not for provocation, or shock worth, however since you’re craving to not play by the foundations, or contort your self into the expectations and guidelines about who and what you’re meant to be.
Arnika recounted that at age 15 she’d gone to her first boyfriend’s mother and father’ dwelling for dinner, and wore a floral clear prime and a push-up bra. She laughed on the reminiscence, with a kindness and tenderness—and admiration—in direction of her youthful self. “I knew it was inappropriate, however I needed to do it anyway,” she stated, laughing. “To be that woman who has some bone in her nostril.”