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Two days before his Copenhagen Fashion Week show, Sigurd Bank, founder of cult Scandi label Mfpen, is hard at work in his studio above the Danish capital’s Dubliner pub. He’s just returned from the Paris showroom, and there’s a lot of catching up to do. “I work a lot,” he says. “But we more than doubled the team last year. It’s been a huge weight off my shoulders.”
Many are calling Mfpen’s show a “return” to Copenhagen Fashion Week (CPHFW), after the brand staged some small-scale presentations in its early days (around six years ago). For Bank, the show on 31 January is the brand’s official runway debut. “The presentations were all street cast, we maybe spent €2,000. So I wouldn’t call them shows, necessarily,” he says.
It’s a significant moment for Mfpen, which former buyer Bank founded in 2016. Until now, it has built up a loyal following for its minimalist menswear — including baggy, often-textured suits and shirts — with virtually no marketing.
Mfpen doesn’t do advertising, influencer seeding or paid ads on Instagram, and in many ways has eschewed the traditional fashion system. “It’s funny because we don’t want to be a part of the system. But apart from maybe a Phoebe Philo or Supreme, [who don’t do seasons or wholesale] everyone has to be,” says Bank. “It’s hard to sell to a store in March if the order books close in February. However, I don’t like marketing. We do clothing, we do products and we try to present them in the most beautiful way with nice casting and imagery. That’s it.”
Why, then, do a runway show — in some ways the ultimate marketing exercise?
Mfpen launched womenswear in October last year, and the runway feels like a good place to show it off and “create some impact”, Bank says. That said, he isn’t necessarily shooting for lots of press coverage or new orders. “Fuck that, we have all the stockists we need,” he says with a smile (it is stocked by retailers including London’s Dover Street Market, Ssense, Mr Porter, Slam Jam in Milan and Neighbour in Vancouver; wholesale makes up 40 per cent of sales).
Instead, his reasons for showing are partly emotional. “Fashion shows to me are romantic. But there’s so many fashion weeks and so many shows now, that it’s becoming saturated and losing some of that power. Some brands seem to show every month,” he says. Bank wants to do things differently: “This show needs to be bigger than a block in the calendar. We want to get the most out of it possible. Shows are so ephemeral — we want to treat it differently.”
Kenneth Nissen, fashion editor of Danish magazine Euroman, also points to the city’s growing pull for brands. “With Copenhagen Fashion Week attracting an ever-increasing crowd of international editors and buyers, it’s becoming more and more attractive.”
The new Scandinavian wave
Today, Mfpen has a team of eight, up from three last year. It’s entirely self-funded and exceeded €1.6 million in revenue in 2023, up 30 per cent on the previous year.
The label follows a similar path to Scandi brands like Our Legacy and Sunflower, focused on design-led, contemporary menswear that’s “elevated but not boring”, Bank says. Pieces are minimal, but recognisable from the baggier fit, button or rivet details in jeans, or the brand’s label, which reads “Herreekvipering”, an old Danish word associated with traditional menswear outfitters.
When asked which looks are his favourite, Bank shakes his head, touching the textured shirting, baggy-fit suits and grey-wash jeans. “The idea is it’s a whole wardrobe, there’s no show pieces here, we don’t do various colourways of one style to sell. I would wear every piece. That’s the point.”
Like its competitors, Mfpen is at a “Scandinavian price point”, as Bank calls it: pieces retail from around €230 for a shirt, to €600 for a coat. “Everyone in Scandinavia is middle class, I barely know anyone who can afford luxury. I spoke to Ulrik [Pedersen] from Sunflower the other day. He said there’s a new Scandinavian wave and we are part of it.”
The brand has global resonance, finding success in Asia with its slouchier shirts and tailoring, and also building a fan base in the States, partly propelled by US menswear podcast ‘Throwing Fits’, run by James Harris and Lawrence Schlossman. Mfpen was selected for the duo’s Mr Porter collaboration last year, and the brand is frequently called out on the show. “They’ve done a lot for us, it’s crazy how big the impact has been,” Bank says.
Staying true to the vision
The Autumn/Winter 2024 collection is around 60 to 70 per cent deadstock, sourced in Italian and Portuguese mills, alongside tencel, post-consumer recycled wool or linen, and some organic cotton. This limits the brand’s growth and production capacity — and that’s the point. “Growth isn’t an aim for us,” says Bank. “We like to make money but we don’t want to [scale] too fast. If we have a coat, we may make 150 to 200 and once it’s sold out we can’t make more. We like to see it in the right stores.”
Mfpen leverages production limitations to its advantage, says Nissen. “When you see shirts from Mfpen, you know that it won’t be available forever and only a few hundred people will own that specific style.”
For Bank, it’s about staying true to his original vision. “As soon as I see people making decisions based on money rather than creativity, it turns me off. It’s a bit like when your favourite band starts making hits. We don’t mind playing small venues. It’s not about being everyone’s favourite.”
The absence of colour across the AW24 collection, speaks to his approach. Bank recalls a pink cardigan he made in the past, at the request of a sales agent who said it would attract buyers’ eyes in the showroom. “We did it and I felt so bad afterwards,” he says, “I didn’t identify myself with that cardigan.”
Typically, to keep Mfpen’s messaging consistent, Bank casts the same seven models for its lookbooks. So, casting 24 models for a show was a big scale up this season, he says. This time he had to outsource. “Our models are different from most brands, we look for models with personality who have other creative interests, and we don’t like certain standards of beauty. So we’ve had to find more of those this season, which was a challenge.”
Mfpen has no interest in using CPHFW as a springboard to show in Paris, like many Scandi brands. But after this experience, perhaps he’s warming to marketing, just a little bit. As we walk to the Nicklas Skovgaard show together around the corner, he teases: “Next season, we won’t show, but we will do something else.”
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