Danish girl style: effortlessly chic, practical yet playful – ‘fashion for getting things done in’

When it comes to enduring style tropes, the mythical “French girl” might exude nonchalant chic, but the just-as-elusive “Danish girl” is the cool one you’d want to be best friends with. And borrow all of her clothes. Even if you can never quite figure out how she makes such disparate items work so perfectly together.

Of course, just as you might go to Paris and find not every woman is a basket-toting, chain-smoking, Simone de Beauvoir-reading ingénue in a perfectly knotted trench coat, so too is the Danish girl something of a broad-brush generalisation.

Yet style stereotypes exist for a reason, and as Copenhagen Fashion Week showed in August, there is a thread in Danish style. How to define it? Perhaps it is an innate sense of the playful, be it a propensity toward print clashes, unexpected colour combinations, or pushing proportion to new limits with super-oversized silhouettes or meringue-esque puffy sleeves.

A quick scan of the real, mismatched kind of street style (welcome back!) from this year’s Copenhagen Fashion Week reveals a joyful willingness to contrast and exaggerate. Indeed, if I was to try and sum up Danish style I’d think of perhaps someone wearing a baseball cap with strappy high-heel sandals or a cloudlike puff sleeved dress in, say, vivid Kermit green, worn with New Balance sneakers.

In any case, the first time I visited Copenhagen, within around five minutes I had bought a pair of striped, metallic lurex socks and a fuzzy bubblegum pink Ganni sweater with a giant bow at the back. These were slightly incongruous additions to a wardrobe of mainly black, navy and white, and quite truthfully, no move a self-confident Dane sure of her own style would ever make anyway.