Soulland’s Silas Adler on Bringing Copenhagen Energy to Pitti Uomo
MILAN — Energy is a word Soulland’s cofounder and creative director Silas Adler uses pretty often to describe the brand’s ethos.
To be sure, the Copenhagen-based brand is part of a movement that has seen the North European capital move into the limelight with such labels as Ganni and Rotate seemingly built for the Instagram generation.
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In spite of his attachment to the local scene, Soulland has grown up and will decamp to Florence for a show as special guest of Pitti Uomo on Wednesday.
Just don’t call this move an act of maturity.
“For us, it’s not so much about taking the brand somewhere else, it’s about continuing to do what we are doing but maybe to start showing it to a larger audience,” Adler said bluntly.
“For brands, it’s never like one thing making a big difference, but it’s always about continuing to show what your narrative is, again and again. And it feels like this is a very good opportunity to remind everyone what the brand is about,” the designer offered.
Soulland is orchestrating the parade as to telegraph the same domestic energy, filled with street casting, sustainable clothing with street cred and suited-up flair — and a few cool collaborations, with Li Ning, Laerke Bagger and sunglass company Ace & Tate.
Courtesy of Soulland
The show is to be held on the rooftop amphitheater of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino concert hall, an imposing, open-air venue overlooking the city. It is poised to make for a great Instagram photo op at dusk. In August, the brand will parade the spring collection’s “second act,” with new looks at Copenhagen Fashion Week.
The uncharacteristic Florence location, in a city full of Renaissance palazzos and lush gardens, nods to the same peculiar energy Adler mentions so often — its disruptiveness speaks to the brand’s commitment to stay true to itself.
Since issuing its first sustainability report in 2020, the brand’s responsible approach has trickled down to the organization of the fashion shows, which will be staged with as little waste as possible. This poses restrictions and limits, but working within boundaries is something Adler embraces with enthusiasm, challenged to “create poetry” within unexpected environments.
Only three elements are on Soulland’s fashion shows’ check lists: music, seating and light. “Basically, I want to try to do something where everything that we bring to the show is not disposable, so it’s all things that can be used more times,” Adler explained.
The brand has been recently pivoting toward street and Instagram casting, tapping into the actual cool kids that wear the Danish brand on the street, be they men or women.
Adler has come to a point where he thinks no gender rules are needed in fashion. After introducing womenswear around six seasons ago, he observed female customers embracing the oversize suits core to the menswear offering, hence the strategy: developing a wider size set suitable for every body shape, gender and taste.
“I don’t think it’s my job to define who should wear it or not,” Adler said.
The spring 2023 collection centers on that gender-free notion and embeds Soulland’s responsibly sourced fabrics. It leans on contrasts of oversize and tight silhouettes, body-hugging knits and loose tailoring, the latter with a very Italian flair for the bold — think exaggerated fits and fabrics, including a silver metallic number.
It’s a serendipitous homage to Pitti Uomo’s prowess in sartorial wear.
“I didn’t consciously think about that, but if you look at the collection there are definitely elements of clash in the sartorial, classic, elegant wardrobe,” Adler said.
Although Adler wouldn’t describe the Florence show as marking a departure from past, street-inflected, underground outings, his vision has grown past the skater culture that informed his seminal collections, although a personal connection to that world remains.
Courtesy of Soulland
“For me, it’s much more about doing stuff that makes sense and telling a story and having a space where I can put my personality into, that’s more important,” he said. “For some people, they need to call it streetwear to understand it, that’s up to them. I would not use that word myself, but yeah, some people just need to put a label on it.”
Eventually backed by the Florence parade, Soulland’s ambitious plans include resuming the brand’s physical retail push (a recent Berlin pop-up proved customers’ intact appetite for brick-and-mortar, he contended) and upping the ante on sustainability.
“We’ve done a lot and come a long way, but there’s still so much more we could do and new ways of doing business that we want to explore,” he said mentioning a recently launched pilot where the brand takes back unsold stock, cleans it and resells it.
“It’s very important to go out in the world and show what the brand is about and that’s something that we really want to continue doing,” Adler said.
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