Glass Skin Survived Its Own Funeral at Copenhagen Fashion Week

At Friheden, an outdoor setting on the founder's family estate, By Malene Birger staged its spring 2027 show on August 3 and let the light do most of the work. Models moved through dappled shade in barely-there makeup, a wash of gloss placed high on the cheekbones to catch what sun made it through the trees. Two days later at Stine Goya the formula repeated: a deep side part, a single pop of lilac blush, skin left to read like skin. Danish labels, the week's own coverage noted, tend to let the clothes talk while the face stays quiet.

Then Collina Strada arrived and argued otherwise. The New York label, making its Copenhagen debut as the week's first ever International Guest, sent Zenia Jaeger and Johanna Nomiey of the sustainable line Submission Beauty backstage with a two word brief: more is more. They worked plastic free glitter, custom shades in silver, baby blue, light green, scarlet and gold, into eyes, lips, bodies and hair, finished deliberately undone, as if the models had wandered in from an all night party. Vogue Scandinavia opened its backstage report with a verdict.

The technique the funeral skipped over

That line traveled fast, the kind of quote that becomes a trend headline by the time a wire service files its season roundup. Sitting next to it, largely unremarked, was the fact that the rest of the schedule, thirty six shows across four days marking the week's twentieth anniversary, mostly kept working in the register Collina Strada was credited with ending.

The look several outlets covering the week called glass skin, a sheer highlighter across cheekbones and eyelids, a base left translucent enough to show real texture underneath, is not a generic industry default. It is a specific technique with a specific point of origin. The term entered English language beauty coverage out of Korean skincare culture, tied to the step by step routines Korean American makeup artist Ellie Choi documented online in 2017, built on a Korean approach that treats prepared skin, not concealer, as the finished look. It moved from there into K-pop styling and then into Western editorial vocabulary, arriving in Copenhagen already carrying that history.

None of this makes Collina Strada's backstage dishonest. Submission Beauty's plastic free glitter fits Copenhagen Fashion Week's own binding sustainability rules, which require every brand on the official schedule to use at least fifty percent sustainable materials. A one off show from a debuting guest label is exactly the kind of moment built to announce a rupture. But a single show's glitter does not retire a technique that four other days of the same week were still quietly running.

It's RIP to "clean girl" makeup, according to Collina Strada.

What happened at Copenhagen this season was not a changing of the guard so much as two claims sharing one calendar: one loud, sustainable and glitter forward, staged by a guest; one quiet and dewy, staged by labels that live there year round and that trace, whether they would name it or not, back to a Korean idea of what finished skin looks like. The trend headline is easy to write. The harder question, and the more useful one, is which show was actually representative before anyone declares the funeral real.

Sources: Vogue Scandinavia · Copenhagen Fashion Week