Ditte Reffstrup, the Ganni creative director, is reminiscing about the first time she and the model Paloma Elsesser met. “Each season when we start to talk about the show, I’m allowed to say one dream model that I’d love to have in the show—sky’s the limit—and in fall 2020 Paloma was my pick and we managed to get her,” she said on a Zoom a few days before her show took place at an exhibition hall in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro neighborhood. “We were just super excited to bring her to Copenhagen, and we had a big dinner the night before the show.”
But things did not go as planned.
“I went to the dinner, and I think I ate an oyster or something, and I started to feel sick throughout the day,” Elsesser remembers. “And then we were in lineup—literally in lineup with girls on the runway—and I don’t know what happened, but I just projectile vomited, and before I knew it, there were 10 Danish people around me, my hair is lifted, and there’s a Coca-Cola in my hand.” While everyone told Elsesser that she didn’t have to go through with the show, she realized that the moment was too important to let being sick get in the way. “Ganni put Danish fashion and Copenhagen fashion on the map—it was the first major Danish brand that I had heard of—and the conversation around size hadn’t really happened in a lot of spaces, so it was such an important moment. I knew intrinsically that I needed to walk that fucking runway,” she says, laughing. Reffstrup adds. “I don’t know how you did it, but you were not sick for those four or five minutes. I was like, Okay, now that’s a superstar.”
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But when life gave Elsesser a bout of food poisoning minutes before she was due to close Ganni’s fall 2020 show, she soldiered on to the runway and ate, as the popular saying goes.
Ganni’s Ditte Reffstrup and Paloma Elsesser, the designer of a capsule collaboration that will debut next spring, photographed in Copenhagen the day before the show
Today Elsesser was back on the runway, this time opening the show in a slinky, textured dress and matching trousers in a rich shade of burgundy. Her return to the Ganni runway comes with something extra—a sneak peek at the capsule between the model and the Danish label that will hit stores early next year. “When we do a collab, it’s always super important that both voices are represented,” Reffstrup says. “We talked Paloma through the whole inspiration behind the collection and then let her have an open and free creative process.” The resulting collection includes a mix of ready-to-wear pieces available in Ganni’s full size range of EU 32 to 52, and it reflects Elsesser’s own approach to getting dressed.
