For years, Copenhagen exported a very specific fantasy of taste.

Clean coats. Perfect trousers. Expensive-looking knitwear. A bicycle somewhere in the background. Nothing too loud, nothing too desperate, everything styled as if it had happened accidentally.

At Copenhagen Fashion Week SS27, that fantasy started to look considerably less interested in behaving.

The week marked Copenhagen Fashion Week’s 20th anniversary, with 34 shows and presentations across the official programme. But the more interesting milestone was aesthetic. The version of Scandinavian fashion built around restraint is still there. It just no longer owns the room.

Colour got brighter. Textures became stranger. Lace, craft, sportswear, underwear and deliberately awkward combinations kept appearing. The kind of outfit that would once have been edited down now seemed more likely to be given one extra thing.

Apparently, Copenhagen got bored of looking tasteful.

Minimalism was never the whole story.

The clearest sign came from outside Scandinavia.

Collina Strada became the first designer invited through Copenhagen Fashion Week’s new International Guest Slot, bringing Hillary Taymour’s New York maximalism into a system that has spent years making sustainability an actual entry requirement rather than a press-release adjective.

The result made the combination feel strangely obvious.

For its Copenhagen collection, Collina Strada worked with one-off upcycled looks and deadstock materials, but the clothes never treated sustainability as a reason to become visually polite. There were intricate surfaces, distorted proportions, glitter, romantic dresses and denim manipulated until it stopped behaving like denim.

That distinction matters.

Sustainable fashion has spent years being visually coded as responsible: neutral colours, natural fibres, serious faces, the aesthetic equivalent of having your recycling correctly separated.

Copenhagen increasingly seems interested in proving that responsibility can also be ridiculous, sexy and excessive.

The most interesting thing Copenhagen exported this season was not a trend. It was permission to stop confusing good taste with restraint.

The rest of the schedule supported the same shift.

Marimekko, Stine Goya and By Malene Birger returned to the runway. Paolina Russo and Collina Strada brought more international energy into the calendar. Emerging designers appeared beside established Nordic names, while collaborations like O.Files and adidas made the line between technical sportswear and fashion increasingly difficult to locate.

None of this means the Scandinavian uniform has disappeared.

There were still clothes designed for actual lives rather than cars waiting outside fashion shows. Practicality remains one of Copenhagen’s most convincing advantages over bigger fashion capitals. People need to walk, cycle, work, carry things and survive weather that does not care about their outfit.

But practicality is becoming less visually predictable.

A bike-friendly outfit can contain lace. A sustainable dress can sparkle. A serious designer can make something funny. A wardrobe can be useful without looking like somebody searched “quiet luxury” on Pinterest and stopped there.

That change makes Copenhagen more relevant at exactly the right moment.

The industry has spent the last few years exhausting minimalism, clean-girl aesthetics and the idea that wealth should be communicated through clothes that barely communicate anything at all.

SS27 offered something messier.

Not maximalism for its own sake. Not chaos as trend forecasting. Just more room for personality.

Twenty years after Copenhagen Fashion Week began, the city no longer needs to prove that Scandinavian fashion deserves international attention.

It finally looks free enough to have some fun with it.