Backstage at Sia Arnika’s spring 2026 show, a meditation on the tension between the clothed and unclothed body, what with its lingerie, t-shirting, and shirting, all of which contained, and simultaneously didn’t, the human form, there was no moodboard, no assemblage of imagery, no evocation of stylistic past glories, to pore over. Instead, what this Danish designer, who has shown in Berlin since she moved here from Copenhagen 12 years ago, offered was a deeply personal coming of age narrative that she’d built her collection around, one informed by life experience, her formative years growing up in rural Denmark, in all their raw and tender and beautiful glory.
Arnika had also been thinking about an autobiographical short story by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgard that she’d recently read, which focused on the awkwardness of dating, and sex, and trying to find yourself in that mythic country we all know as adulthood. “It’s this whole thing of, ‘Who am I?’” Arnika said. “I want to be somebody I am not.” She’d then alighted on the cultish 1970 movie, A Love Story (not to be confused with the McGraw/O’Neal vehicle of a similar vintage and near identical name) by director Roy Anderson, another tale of youthful sexual awakening, this one hailing from Sweden.
This all, said Arnika, led her to think about the big emotions of youth, and how they can color your adult life. Also, not just the feels, but what you wear; how we can get it wrong when we’re young and inexperienced at life, trying to figure out how we want to dress and look—and how you might sometimes want to revert back to it, because, what the hell, some days you just wake up feeling that way. Not for provocation, or shock value, but because you’re yearning to not play by the rules, or contort yourself into the expectations and rules about who and what you’re meant to be.
Arnika recounted that at age 15 she’d gone to her first boyfriend’s parents’ home for dinner, and wore a floral transparent top and a push-up bra. She laughed at the memory, with a kindness and tenderness—and admiration—towards her younger self. “I knew it was inappropriate, but I wanted to do it anyway,” she said, laughing. “To be that girl who has some bone in her nose.”
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