One Day, Two Flights and Copenhagen in Between
Visiting A New Creative District
05 August 2026 — 06:40 AM
London to Copenhagen. An early departure, touching down at 09:30 local time. By evening, already on the move again departing CPH at 23:15, bound for London. One day, two flights and a city encountered in the space between. For its Spring/Summer 2027 season, Copenhagen Fashion Week introduced the CPHFW Creative Hub: a space conceived to extend the week beyond the traditional runway and create room for experimentation across fashion, design, objects and wider creative culture. Its location at Paper Island (Papirøen), was significant. Positioned in Copenhagen’s inner harbour beside Christianshavn, the artificial island of Christiansholm was once occupied by naval storage buildings and warehouses filled with imported paper for the Danish press. Its industrial purpose eventually gave way to a more informal period of cultural occupation, when the island became known for creative studios, events and its temporary street-food market.
Today, Paper Island has been reconfigured as a mixed-use urban district. Designed by Cobe Architects, the development brings together housing, hospitality, retail, cultural facilities and publicly accessible waterfront space. Its architecture draws on the scale and character of the old harbour warehouses, translating their pitched roofs, robust materials and repetitive gables into a contemporary piece of the city. The ground floor remains open to public life, while promenades, timber platforms and spaces beside the water reconnect the island to Copenhagen’s harbour. Cobe describes the project as a transformation from an industrial site into a cultural, residential and commercial destination.
There was an appropriate continuity between this setting and the purpose of the Creative Hub. Paper Island is itself an exercise in reinterpretation: retaining the memory of one use while making space for another. The Creative Hub applied a similar principle to fashion, asking what can happen when familiar categories are opened up and placed into conversation with other disciplines.
Everyday Elevated
Within the Hub, VINNY’s and Forestalgia presented Everyday, Elevated, an installation centred on the objects and rituals that quietly shape daily life. VINNY’s footwear was shown alongside Orbit, Forestalgia’s debut grooming object. Rather than presenting either product through a conventional retail display, the collaboration arranged them as sculptural still lifes among wildflowers, steel and a restrained soundscape of ambient jazz and gentle movement. The installation invited visitors to slow down. That proposition felt particularly relevant during fashion week, an event usually defined by speed. Collections appear, images circulate and attention shifts almost immediately towards whatever comes next. Everyday, Elevated created a deliberate interruption to that rhythm. Its focus was not spectacle for its own sake, but the possibility that an ordinary object can become more meaningful through care, material and considered presentation.
Shoes and grooming tools belong to the routines through which we prepare ourselves for the world. They are handled repeatedly, often without much thought, yet they participate in the construction of identity. We select their colours, forms and materials. We wear them down. We maintain them, replace them or decide to keep them long after their original function has passed. The installation asked us to look again at these familiar things. Its central idea was simple: a product does not have to feel basic simply because it is used every day. Through colour, shape, proportion and material, an essential object can acquire character. Through continued use, that character becomes personal. What begins as a product can gradually become a keepsake. The work was playful without becoming disposable and composed without appearing overly precious. Its flowers softened the industrial character of the space; the steel introduced precision; the sound of jazz gave the arrangement its rhythm. Each element strengthened the others. The result sat somewhere between product display, landscape, sculpture and domestic ritual.
Objects as an Expression of Time
Fashion is often discussed through seasons, novelty and change. Everyday, Elevated proposed a quieter measure of value: longevity. A timeless object is not necessarily neutral or anonymous. It can have colour. It can possess an unusual silhouette. It can be expressive and still remain useful. What makes it last is the clarity of its design and the relationship that develops between the object and the person who lives with it.
This distinction matters at a time when objects are produced, photographed and replaced at increasing speed. Elevation is not simply about increasing price or status. It is about increasing attention. When greater attention is given to a material, a detail or the way an object feels in the hand, use becomes more deliberate. When greater attention is given to presentation, the familiar becomes visible again. Design begins to shift from consumption towards attachment. That is where the installation found its potency. It did not attempt to transform everyday life into fantasy. It suggested that everyday life already contains the raw material for meaning.
Architecture, Fashion and the Space Between
Paper Island amplified this message. The district and the installation were working at different scales, but both dealt with the same question: how can something familiar be retained, reinterpreted and given renewed relevance? The former harbour island carries its industrial past forward without becoming a museum of itself. Warehouse forms return as contemporary architecture. The waterfront remains productive, but its purpose has shifted from storage and logistics towards culture, hospitality and public life. Memory is present, though not treated as an obstacle to change.
Inside the Creative Hub, footwear and a grooming object underwent their own change of context. Removed from the shelf and placed among flowers, sound and sculpture, they became prompts for reflection. Architecture framed the encounter. Fashion gave it movement. Product design brought it back to the scale of the body. This is where the value of cross-disciplinary spaces becomes clear. Creative culture rarely develops in isolation. Fashion borrows from architecture; architecture responds to social ritual; objects carry identity; landscapes influence atmosphere. The strongest encounters occur when these boundaries are allowed to overlap.
A Day in Perspective
By evening, the visit was already drawing to a close. The compressed nature of the journey gave each encounter greater focus. Copenhagen was not approached as a destination to be completed, but as a place entered briefly and experienced through a particular moment in its creative life. Taken together, it became a richly seasoned day of experiences. The new Creative Hub provided the setting; its exhibitors presented a range of creative perspectives; Salehe Bembury’s talk brought personal insight into the journey behind the work; and Everyday, Elevated revealed how design, fashion and ordinary rituals can meet through careful presentation.
Architecture framed the day, fashion gave it energy and the conversations added depth. Within a matter of hours, Paper Island offered a concentrated view of creativity across objects, spaces, personal journeys and emerging ideas. We returned with more than a record of an installation. What began as a brief encounter with Copenhagen became a layered experience of design culture and another reminder of how much can be discovered within the space between arrival and departure.
Each encounter gave greater meaning to the next, allowing the day to build gradually rather than revolve around one defining moment. There was also value in experiencing this work physically. Images can document an object or space, but they cannot fully communicate the sequence of moving through it: the scale of Paper Island against the harbour, the transition into the Creative Hub, the atmosphere created through sound and material, or the unexpected conversations taking place around the exhibitions. Being present allowed these separate elements to register as one connected experience.
Salehe Bembury’s reflections reinforced that creative identity is not produced through a single breakthrough. It is constructed over time through curiosity, persistence, experimentation and the willingness to move between different worlds. That perspective felt closely aligned with the Creative Hub itself a place where established categories were loosened and different forms of practice were allowed to coexist. The day also offered a reminder that travel does not always need to be expansive to be meaningful. A short visit can sharpen observation. With limited time, attention becomes more deliberate: what is seen, heard and remembered carries greater weight. The city is absorbed through fragments, yet those fragments can form a lasting impression.
Copenhagen was never going to be completed in a day. Instead, it was opened through a new creative space, a collection of personal and material encounters, and the feeling that there was still more to return to. At the centre of that experience was Everyday, Elevated. With thanks to Virgil Nicholas, founder and creative director of VINNY’s, and Emmanuel Lawal, founder of Forestalgia, whose collaboration brought the installation to life. The experience was documented through film by Heller Studio and photography by Magnus Omme, capturing the atmosphere, details and wider character of the day.
