The Pantsless Trend Lives Another Day in Copenhagen (2024)

When Kendall Jenner went flower shopping in a pair of stockings and no pants, we all thought she was crazy. The look was impractical—the kind of stunt you don’t attempt without paparazzi present to make it a moment. But then it was on the runway at Miu Miu, with models strutting in pink sequined panties … and at shows like Chanel and Dion Lee and Coach. Since Jenner stepped out with no pants, her sister Kylie, Kristen Stewart, and Sydney Sweeney have given the aesthetic a go, as well. I’ve also personally witnessed some brave mortals doing the same on the streets of New York, perhaps to get a reprieve from the blistering summer heat.

The challenge with the pantsless trend is that it doesn’t look  like something that would ever happen organically. Most of us don’t live a life where we can be caught with our pants down, literally and intentionally. I had never seen anyone pull it off in a way that made me think it could exist in the reality in which I live. But then came Copenhagen Fashion Week.

At OpéraSport, the first show of the week, I enviously eyed a model in a striped, billowing blue top, cinched at the waist with a thin black belt with a buckle in the shape of a flower. She wore nothing else but a pair of tall black boots and a black swimsuit bottom. Minutes later, another model made her way down the runway in a black T-shirt with ruffled seams, a bag with a long ruched ruffled strap, and the bottom half of a blue bikini. They are the kind of looks I sometimes find myself putting together when I’m getting ready to go out and no skirt or pair of pants feels quite right. I stare at myself in the mirror and wish for a reality in which I could bare this amount of skin and feel safe from the unwanted stares of men or judgmental onlookers.

Later in the evening, conceptual knitwear brand A. Roege Hove returned to the schedule with its first runway show in a year. Some of my favorite looks were ribbed button-down tank tops worn mostly unbuttoned to reveal belly buttons and midriffs, styled with turtleneck shrugs stretched across shoulders and matching high-waisted ribbed knickers. The models wore heels and bags that molded around the shape of everything carried inside.

By the time London-based designer Sinéad O’Dwyer—who relocated to Copenhagen this season as the winner of the Zalando Visionary Award—showed, I had started to wonder if I’d seen more pantsless looks than pants. A handful of O’Dwyer’s looks consisted of high-cut bodysuits with ribbons zigzagging like a fabric ribcage around each model. Some were worn on their own, while others were paired with lacy underwear peeking out from underneath and hugging the hips.

Maybe it’s because I had taken a cold dip in the canal earlier in the week at the famed La Banchina, where chic Danes gather around a pier to sit in their bikinis and sip orange wine before taking a plunge, but these pantsless looks no longer looked that mad to me. Instead, they all started to make sense.

At least they do in a place like Copenhagen, where locals frequently jump into the water before or after work and can do so without the kind of fear one might feel in New York with the Hudson River or Paris with the Seine. There is an ease to every aspect of life in Denmark’s capital, and it comes across in what people wear and how they wear it.

It’s the reason everyone wants to dress like a Scandi girl—they dress with an effervescent quirk that feels genuine. And so if I were to see one of them prancing down the street in nothing but an A. Roege Hove cardigan, little swimsuit bottoms, and a Caro Editions flower hair clip, I wouldn’t think, How crazy. I’d absolutely buy it. Will Copenhagen Fashion Week be the thing that actually makes the pantsless look go mainstream? I think I have to say, as they do here: Ja.