April 8, 2025 |
When I jump on a call with Sia Arnika, the designer is beaming. It’s a surprisingly sunny morning for early February in Berlin and, she says, “It’s the first day where I didn’t have to get up at six in the morning because I have to finish a collection, so I’m feeling super.” She’d unveiled her AW25 outing at Berlin Fashion Week the weekend prior. “I’ve been very calm throughout the whole thing, surprisingly – even if there’s a big iceberg in front of me, I’m sure we’re going to manage to steer away in time.”
The label, launched in 2020, is still largely a one-woman operation. Freelancers arrive in the lead-up to the collection, while stylist Tim Heyduck has been by Arnika’s side since day one, doubling as both a soundboard and a pseudo-therapist for the designer. But on a day-to-day basis, it’s just Arnika who mans the fort, masterminding sculptural everyday wear and the sort of garb built for clubbing in the future. Staged inside a vast film set near the city’s airport, the AW25 catwalk circled an enormous pool of seaweed which was brought over in suitcases by the designer’s parents from Nykøbing Mors, the sparsely populated town in Denmark they hail from.
“Wet, heavy, smelling of salt – and brought it all the way to Berlin. A piece of my old home, to my new home,” wrote the designer on Instagram. The Dane admits to once being embarrassed about the fact she came from the remote fishing town known for its seafood manufacturing. “I never really talked about being a countryside person, because I always thought it was super uncool. But now I’m fully embracing it.”
Clothing throughout by SIA ARNIKA
Like her SS25 outing, which featured reworked polo shirts inspired by her childhood footballing days, this collection was “very much about a memory from the past of mine – a slightly manufactured memory.” Arnika, 35, based the collection on a “harbour bitch” character inspired by a woman she used to see parading through the local area. “I think she was a factory worker dressed too sexy, somehow,” she says. “She was a bit menacing. I think the kids were all a little afraid of her.”
On the catwalk, the designer’s leggy models came in fisherman plaid shirts that were recontextualised as minidresses and tops threaded with metal wire that jutted forwards. Elsewhere, workwear bomber jackets, cut wide, were worn as dresses and hoodies pastiched the silhouette of a swimming costume, all worn with fishnet tights with oval cut-outs at the knees. “I had a lot of fun with this one,” she says.
Arnika’s collections have cleverly deconstructed and reworked pre-existing garments. “I use something like it is an empty canvas, not necessarily just to turn it into something else,” she explains of her process, which often sees her shrink and balloon silhouettes with disruptive flair. She has quickly become a go-to for Kylie Jenner, who tapped Arnika to co-design a collection with her Khy label, featuring dance-floor-ready twinsets and going-out dresses sliced and diced to show off slivers of flesh, all frosted in sequins. The reality star-cum-business mogul isn’t alone in her appreciation for the Berlin talent. FKA twigs was seen voguing on Instagram with one of the brand’s baguette bags – crafted from jersey sliced and diced into a spider web-like tapestry – lodged beneath her arm. All while Charli xcx was having a Brat summer in a crop top with a cut-out at the boobs and a pair of knickers made from the collar of a men’s polo shirt.
“Chris Horan [Charli’s stylist] reached out about dressing her for her birthday and then it kind of just took off from there,” says Arnika. “I’m really highly appreciative of somebody wanting to take a chance on a fairly unknown brand and giving me a platform. The phone is calling more than it did before, for sure.”
Clothing throughout by SIA ARNIKA
There’s a fearlessness to Arnika’s work that stems from her own journey to self-acceptance. “It’s about getting to a point in my own life where I feel a hundred-per-cent confident in who I am. I don’t necessarily mean confident in a sexy way, I mean just being proud of who I am. I want to carry myself in a certain way and I want my clothes to portray the same emotion.”
Growing up, the designer was raised on a diet of MTV. “Pop culture gave me the only escape route out of the island,” she says. Coming home from school each day, she’d spend hours glued to the television, her window to the big wide world being TV programmes focused on American celebrities. As a child, she even recalls going down the waterfront to send off messages in bottles, hoping someone would stumble across one and rescue her from the banality of small-town life. It wasn’t until she moved to Copenhagen for university that her eyes were truly opened. “I was like, ‘Oh, there’s also art and there are fancy things and underground stuff! I need to brush up my cultural lexicon.’”
Studying a fashion technology course, it was here she began to sow the seeds of what would eventually become her namesake label. “I knew that I wanted to have a brand at some point, so I was like, ‘Okay, I need to know something about production and about sourcing and all these things and then I can study fashion [design] after that.’”
She lived in the Danish capital for just over two years, but quickly craved something bigger, somewhere else. “Copenhagen is very nice, everything is well-kept. There is a Truman Show-ness to the whole thing where you wake up and think, ‘How can everybody be this pretty and this happy at all times?’ There’s no sense of inner decay.”
Moving to Berlin in 2012, she was quickly drawn into the capital’s nocturnal hedonism. “We went to Renate, we went to Tresor, we went to all of [the clubs],” says Arnika, who found solace in a group of fellow international students exploring the city’s underbelly as she was. After being in the city for 12 years now, she says her clubbing days are behind her. “I live right near KitKat [Berlin’s famous sex club]. When I work on Sundays, I always see people either leaving or entering, or all of the above – at that moment I’m pretty happy with my decision about not going out,” she says with a laugh.
Clothing throughout by SIA ARNIKA
Still, her clothes come laced with a rebellious spirit that she observes on the city’s streets. “Even if I don’t go out to dance, I feel like I’m still very much embedded in the culture somehow. It’s all around you, no matter what you do,” she says. She often finds inspiration in unlikely spaces, like the fetish fair Folsom. “It’s really interesting to get a peek behind the curtains of somebody else’s reality. That’s quite interesting for me as a people watcher.” And she likes to use her collections as a character study. “I love to come up with fake stories about what their lives are about. Whether it’s Berlin or anywhere else, there’s always a sense of inspiration in terms of the people. My brain always ends up at the same little point of some fairytale.”
Back to reality, and Arnika is set on developing her label to take things up a notch. “I want to be better at business for myself, growing in a way that doesn’t feel too aggressive, too quickly,” she says. “I need to be able to do it in an organic way where I feel like it’s authentic in terms of where the brand is placed – being a little bit slower and more thoughtful about everything.”
She’s also keen on extending her practice to work with local artists and is destined to dress a new influx of pop darlings. Watch this space.
Taken from 10 DE Issue 01 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
SIA ARNIKA: GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY
Photographer JOSEPH KADOW
Fashion Editor KAMAL Q EMANGA
Talent SIA ARNIKA
Text PAUL TONER
Model MICHELLE NAUMANN
Hair GREGOR MAKRIS
Make-up SUSANNA JONES using BYREDO
Location STUDIO CHERIE
