The Runway Rundown: The Ganni Girl Has Grown Up - Here's What She'll Be Wearing
For Ganni creative director Ditte Reffstrup and her design team, the inspiration for a new collection often begins with a feeling. But this season, they found themselves really feeling the weight of a heavy global backdrop. ‘The world is very noisy,’ she explained at a preview before the show. ‘So we started to talk about protection. And then it moved onto safe places: your home.’
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Home is so much more than a physical place: ‘[It's] also things in your life you take with you from the places you went to, or the places you lived, the people you met,’ she continued. And thus, the concept for its AW25 came into focus: it's about ‘creating this tapestry of life inside of you, in your safe place.’
It was fitting, then, that Ganni chose a home (of sorts) as the setting for its second show Paris: Hôtel Pozzo di Borgo, the storied mansion in the heart of the city that was the late Karl Lagerfeld’s primary residence for almost three decades. To be sure, it’s not the kind of home most of us can boast about — it’s grand, as opulent and sprawling as you’d imagine a Lagerfeld home to be — but it was a beautiful context for the collection, which brought the concept of home to life in a more cosy, lived-in sort of way. Just as Reffstrup said, home is not just the exterior of a building, it’s the personality you bring and the memories you create inside of it.
This season, the clothes were texture-rich, with the team using weightier fabrics to provide almost a cocoon-like protection, explained Reffstrup, while still keeping that ‘very sensitive, almost poetic feminine touch to it,’ she said. ‘[It] is very much what defines Ganni, working with those contrasts, always trying to create some kind of a balance.’
Many fabrics were reminiscent of interiors from a bygone era: a brown-rose printed velour and a silky floral Ikat both evoked almost-fading wallpapers; a woven floral tapestry-jacquard that could have belonged to a vintage carpet or sofa. They sat beside new sustainable material innovations, like the sequins made from seaweed that embellished a black silky jacket, or Celium leather produced using bacteria fermentation, used to make the mega-mega-bags slung over models’ shoulders. (Ganni has long been a pioneer in experimenting with new sustainable fabrics and bringing them to market.)
Dresses and skater skirts were either extra long or mini layered over coordinating trousers. Chunky knits were handmade, decorated with crochet flowers and a peek-a-boo back to reveal florals layered underneath. Other pieces were draped like curtains to create volume and accessorised with bonnets, which were almost like ‘very cute, subtle’ helmets, explained Reffstrup. ‘I think the heaviness of the collection is really beautiful, that you really feel quite protected in a very beautiful way,’ she added.
The collection was signature Ganni, but it also felt a little more grown-up. But, then again, Ganni is growing up, celebrating its 16th birthday this year. Perhaps it’s also Paris providing a new context for the brand’s fun-loving spirit after years of being the headline show during Copenhagen Fashion Week.
‘Copenhagen is where our heart is; it's a very big part of our DNA, [but] the beautiful thing is that I can feel how the house has become so much more international,’ Reffstrup said. ‘It feels almost like a new journey.’
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