Everything You Need to Know About Stockholm Fashion Week, 2026

Major change is afoot in Sweden, a fact highlighted by the two shows that bookended Stockholm Fashion Week, by provocative and kinky Gullbo on one side and the ruminatively minimalist Leoní on the other. Not only did these collections represent two vastly different ends of an aesthetic spectrum, but they also marked a generational shift (which was also evident in street style).

By now, it’s no great secret that Swedish fashion has made impactful inroads in the major fashion capitals: Acne Studios in Paris for many years, Our Legacy, with its expanding with investment from LVMH, Ellen Hodakova Larsson was the first Swede to win the LVMH Prize, and rising star Petra Fagerström, known for her lenticular knits, who now presents her work in London.

But that came at the expense of Fashion Week back in Stockholm. The expatriation of those bigger talents, plus the disruption of COVID, left a vacuum at home that the Association of Swedish Fashion Brands (ASFB), the not-for-profit organization that launched Stockholm Fashion Week in 2005, was unable to fill. At the same time, there was the emergence of brands like Rave Review and Teurn Studios. As nearby Copenhagen Fashion Week grew, SFW seemed to shrink, and in 2019, the shows were put on hold. In the interim, the Swedish Fashion Council presented Fashion X, a non-seasonal experience, a few times.

Then, last year, the ASFB relaunched as STHLMFW, with the help of government funding. “The Swedish fashion subculture that’s been building momentum beneath the surface, waiting to have its own space and time again,” said its director, John-Jamal Gille,  of the new edition. The idea, he explained, “is to rebalance the spotlight, not by excluding anyone, but by making room for those who haven’t had it yet.” That translated into a focus on emerging talents and a pick-a-season schedule, which seemed to focus on talent often associated with Södermalm, which could be described as the Brooklyn of Stockholm.

Last time around, the participation of two new brands founded by designers with years of industry experience—Studio Constance by Rebecca Dovenryd Almberg and Past Tense by Victor Lindh and Adrien Forray—provided some ballast by upping the quality level and showing what newer brands might grow into. This year, not only did the level of the brands vary greatly, but the focus, in keeping with the new mission, felt solidly anti-establishment. It would have been interesting to see more of the breadth of the Swedish industry, to have Dagmar next to DSTN, for example.

Still, there was a lot to take away from the event. There is a huge hunger for a place and occasion for fashion expression on a larger scale. Though the seeming lack of boundary between what went down the runway and what was seen on the street can be explained, in part, by the fact that the designers, being mostly of a type, were speaking directly to their own underground communities, it demonstrates that there are non-traditional ways for fashion to exist. Take, for example, Dustin Glickman, a self-taught half-American designer, who drew a huge crowd who were already working the Western look he proposed. He will sell his collection of fresh-off-the-runway pieces in a pop-up this week.

I asked Emma Frisdell, a journalist and influencer beloved by street style photographers, her thoughts on the “week” (which was really 2 ½ days). “I find myself reflecting on street style culture—the very thing I fell in love with almost 10 years ago. I spent hours on Vogue’s street style pages and loved how people, for a brief moment, were given an international stage,” she wrote. “Today, much of that feels missing to me at the international fashion weeks, lost in commercial deals, show dressings, and the strong—but understandable—celebrity focus. But as I look through the street style images, I’m excited to see traces of that magic again. I see fashion enthusiasts knitting their own dresses, crafting hats, and wearing their grandmother’s old Dolce & Gabbana leather jacket from the ’70s. They deserve to be on stage.”

It’s clear that the reimagined STHLMFW is still in a transitional phase, but to ASFB chairman Michael Elembeck, a gallerist and entrepreneur, the future looks bright. “Our ambition is not to recreate Stockholm Fashion Week as it existed in the past, nor to replicate other ‘fashion week’ capitals,” he told Vogue. “Fashion is evolving, and the question we ask ourselves today is: what can Stockholm contribute to the global fashion conversation that is uniquely its own?”

To label something a fashion week creates specific expectations, which emerging talents can’t always meet, yet their vitality and their connection to the future fashion consumer are vital. It’s somewhat ironic then that one of the shows most in line with the look and spirit of the street was best represented by Peter Jansson, a St. Martin's grad and 20-plus year industry veteran who helped launch the juggernauts that were Cheap Monday and Weekday. His show, a paean to Manchester’s Hacienda club (the New Wave ’80s), somehow dovetailed into a meta reflection on the indie sleaze revival. The designer, who walked in his own show, twisted the focus on the “young folks” narrative—as did Steph Orozco with her age and size varied cast.

Asked how the landscape had changed since the 2010s, Jansson noted that back in the day, “older people didn’t care about trends as much as now, and  it’s more OK to change styles when you get older.” He attributes the return of skinny jeans as a kind of teenage rebellion. “The reason [they] are coming back,” he explained, “is that almost all 18-old-year kids now have a mom with wide jeans, and you don’t want to look like your parents.”

“These kids missed the skinny jeans period, so it is very interesting for them now,” he continued. “And also the secondhand market is so much bigger now, which makes trends mix much more now than before.”

Below, find a lowdown of the interesting, youthful, melange that was STHLMFW 2026.

The lone minimalistic collection at STHLMFW was presented by Leoní, the brand founded in 2024 by designer Central St Martin’s grad Filippa Fuxe and retail legend Nathalie Schuterman. For fall, Fuxe linked the idea of inheritance to the body, making a corset top using a body cast. For the designer, this was a personal project inspired by the poems by her ancestor, Swedish poet Karin Ek. Fuxe explained she often pondered on time, and made use of her grandmother’s collection of vintage clothes, honing in on ’30s silhouettes. “Rather than reproducing them,” Fuxe said, “I deconstructed their pattern cutting and construction techniques, using them as a starting point for a contemporary wardrobe. In many ways, the process mirrored the collection’s broader theme: the idea that what we inherit is never carried forward unchanged, but continually reinterpreted through each generation.”

Madeline Woo, who Dance magazine called “Ballet’s International ‘It’ Girl,” is making waves in fashion with collections that deconstruct, grungify, and gothify balletcore. Formerly with the Royal Swedish Ballet, she is currently a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. True to classical choreography, Woo chafes at the regimented aesthetics of her art. “I feel like ballet is very backwards sometimes in the way that it’s so set in tradition that it can’t evolve and move forward. And I feel like it’s seen as [keeping] the art from ‘pure.’ There are no tattoos allowed, no ripped tights, no grunge, no dirtiness—it has to be absolutely perfect at all times, and I personally don’t agree with that because that strips away all individuality.” Maddwoo’s fans are hardly wallflowers; moxie is required to wear the brand’s skin-baring tops, JNCO-sized denim, or deconstructed tutus.

Dance like everybody is looking, just might be Peter Jansson’s motto. Having launched Bewider in 2018 as, he said, a “very underground brand with a lot of inspiration coming from the rave culture,” the designer shuttered the brand after he was diagnosed with brian cancer. In recovery, he started sewing, and a pull from a stylist started a snowball effect. His plan, going forward, is to offer more fashionable pieces alongside a core offering. This collection, featuring zippers, tears, and holes as a way to expose skin, was inspired by the Hacienda nightclub. The show opened with an opera singer performing New Order’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” which could be a sly reference to the predominance of distressed fabric that made its way down the runway. When the band New York’s 2022 track “Skinny Jeans” went on, a model epitomizing the indie sleaze look appeared. It was a wink-wink and meta moment, as 20 years ago, Jansson was one of the people responsible for taking the super-slim fit from Stockholm to the world.

One of the more seasoned brands to show at STHLMFW is Steph Orzoco, founded by its namesake in 2015 in her native Mexico. When the designer followed her partner to Sweden, she interned with Rave Review.  This collection, her first presented in the capital, was made locally from upcycled and deadstock materials using a “single-needle process” (no cutting corners with overlock stitches) and artisanal practices. Orozco chose to show her clothes on a multicultural group of friends, family, and mature models; the effect was to use casting as a form of narrative.