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In keeping with the playful, anything-goes feel of Copenhagen Fashion Week, the New York brand Collina Strada has built a devoted community among the city’s style set that celebrates its weirder, wilder side. It was fitting, then, that designer Hillary Taymour inaugurated CPHFW’s International Guest Slot, sponsored by The Climate Pledge, bringing her irreverent world to the Danish capital on Thursday night.
For the brand, which normally produces only a fraction of everything it presents on the runway, the one-off pre-spring 2027 collection, titled “Delirium in Bloom,” served as an opportunity to bring its most ambitious and labor-intensive ideas to life.
“I have boards every season of fabric manipulation and techniques, which is where we start the collection,” Taymour told ELLE the day before the show, speaking from the brand’s makeshift studio. “Then that gets watered down based on what production can do. So, these are all the prime of the prime fabric techniques that we haven’t been able to produce.”
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Presented on the harbor to the tune of a string quartet, the collection began with a series of toiles—a blank canvas, Taymour notes—that laid the groundwork for its textural, Technicolor universe. The whisper-thin dresses and fluid tops were ruched, twisted, and draped to cling like a second skin, bringing Taymour’s once-discarded fabric experiments to life with a sense of whimsy and a design caliber that made the experimentation feel fully realized.
“It felt like purging some of my best work and ideas that I haven’t gotten to show people yet,” she said of her process. “It was cathartic.”
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Taymour has a knack for pattern and color play, which manifested in familiar pastel floral motifs from the pre-fall collection, shown layered on top of disco sequins and lace inlays. Other patterns emerged organically from the design techniques themselves. For instance, a checkered micro-mini skirt was stitched from individual pieces of contrasting baby pink and olive green fabrics and then ironed in opposing directions.
While sustainability often gets a bad rap for neutral palettes, or “oatmeal,” as the designer put it, her world was anything but beige. Models wore bug-eye glasses, as did Taymour when she took her bow, with tinsel woven through their hair and glitter makeup that evoked the look of woodland nymphs.
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“There’s a level of work and respect for the craft and being able to do it and feel like [I’m] not having to think ‘this is what you have to sell,’” the designer said of collaborating with The Climate Pledge, which hand-selected the brand for its commitment to sustainable design. “Sustainability is something we’re all learning together, so the more you can educate people and show them—that’s why we’re all here.”
Taymour’s next stop is New York Fashion Week in September, where she’s sure to bring Copenhagen’s communal spirit back to a fashion community she has long made her own.
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Matthew Velasco is the Fashion News Editor at ELLE. Based in New York City, he previously worked as a News Writer at W magazine and an Assistant Editor at V magazine. Outside of fashion, he enjoys interior design, tennis (both watching and playing), and a jam-packed antique store.