At Mfpen’s debut runway show—the hot ticket of the season in Copenhagen—models walked within inches of the standing audience. Sigurd Pantalon had been inspired by a live concert to present his clothes, including the newly launched womenswear line, in an interactive way that emphasized movement and dimensionality; plus it was a way to bring together his twin passions, music and tailoring. The soundtrack, he said, was his own playlist and included tracks by Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Fugazi, and Youthanized played at max volume. When the music stopped the room reverberated with a buzzy sort of silence akin to post-concert ear ringing. You might say that Mfpen’s designs have a similar lingering resonance.
“The clothing we do is not for the guy who wants to be the center of the room, it’s for the guy who loves what he wears, but doesn’t need everyone else to know it,” said Pantalon. “We don’t want to make noisy clothing. And I feel that’s very Danish.”
Just as musicians create magic with 12 notes, so Pantalon and his team work within set parameters, namely the deadstock fabrics they find. These are, by choice, often suiting materials, worked in non-traditional ways. “We like the workmanship and the craftsmanship and the history of tailoring, but we just want to put it in a different context,” he said.
For fall that was a space somewhere between the workplace and a sweaty venue. The silhouette was narrower, but the team’s focus was less on silhouette and more on washes and surface treatments. There were laser-distressed jeans for him, and even more tattered show pieces, in white, for her. These were made using cloth discovered in a factory that for 20 years had been used for dry washing sweaters. “This fabric is something we cannot reproduce,” Pantalon said. “For me, this is the top tier of doing something where one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
The designer didn’t just give new life to old fabrics, he revived sartorial touches like wing-tip collars and necklines, yet even in pinstripes the models didn’t look formal. “I’m always thinking how you take something from a world that you don’t belong to, like suit and tie, and then put it into a different context,” he said.
Pantalon is a rebel with a cause, which is to recontextualize not only existing materials, but power symbols in such a way that they become anti-power. “I don’t want to feel like a real estate broker or something when I put on a suit, I want to feel me,” he said. “I want to feel like I can go to a metal concert and not feel out of place.” You could call this approach his super power.