Nine metres of red and white spiral, turning slowly in a Copenhagen garden. It's the opening gesture of Henrik Vibskov's largest exhibition to date.
The structure was created by Vibskov, and it's called The Umbrico Spiral, installed at Design museum Danmark ahead of Henrik Vibskov: The Exhibition, which opens on 18 September and runs until 21 February 2027. Vibskov has spent twenty-five years building a body of work where fashion, sculpture, sound and costume vibrate with one another, each borrowing colour and rhythm from the last until the lines between them blur.
Henrik Vibskov, Spring Summer 2023, Copenhagen Fashion Week.
Vibskov trained at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2001, and has since produced more than fifty collections, shown at institutions from MoMA to Palais de Tokyo. For textile readers, the appeal isn't the fashion-week gloss but what sits underneath it: an approach to cloth as raw material for building whole imagined worlds. The Copenhagen show will include 44 display cases of objects, prototypes and studio ephemera, alongside large-scale installations visitors can wander through.
Henrik Vibskov, Observations of Humans. Photo: Josefina Eikenaar. Courtesy of Design Museum Danmark
Henrik Vibskov, The Transparent Tongue, Paris, Spring Summer 2013 Collection.
Prototypes matter here. They're the moment when a fabric idea is still half-formed, still shifting shape, before it settles into a finished garment. Seeing that stage laid bare, in glass cases beside the polished collections, gives a rare look at how a designer actually thinks in cloth: through instinct, happy accidents, and versions of ideas that began as one thing then drifted somewhere unexpected and led to something better.
Henrik Vibskov, Madama Butterfly. Photo Mathias Baus. Courtesy of Design Museum Danmark
Henrik Vibskov costumes for Alexander Ekman's ballet Hammer at GöteborgsOperan. Image courtesy of Tanz Köln.
That same sense of drift and discovery runs through everything Vibskov has explored. He has designed costumes for opera and dance, most recently for Alexander Ekman's ballet Hammer at GöteborgsOperan, where fabric has to hold its colour and shape through movement, sweat and shifting stage light rather than a single photographed moment. Costume design of this kind asks different questions of cloth than fashion does: how does it catch the eye from thirty metres back? How does it move with a body mid-leap? How will the colour glow or fade under a wash of stage lighting? It's a discipline that has clearly folded back into his collections, which have always treated the body as something to be built around and set in motion, rather than simply dressed.
Henrik Vibskov. Photo Courtesy of Louis Poulsen
Music drifts through all of it too. Vibskov is a working drummer, has performed with Trentemøller, Hess Is More and Mikael Simpson, and that rhythmic sensibility surfaces in his textiles as pattern, repetition and colour that seem to pulse gently across a surface. He is also a professor at Design School Kolding, passing on this dreamlike, boundary-blurring approach to material to a new generation of makers.
The exhibition's own framing captures the spirit best: a universe where mistakes are gold, and beauty emerges from chaos. For anyone drawn to textile design at its most imaginative and unbound, Copenhagen this autumn is worth the trip.
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Further Information:
Henrik Vibskov: The Exhibition is on show at Design Museum Danmark from 18 September until 21 February 2027
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Image Credits:
Lead: Henrik Vibskov, The Umbrico Spiral, Black timber frame wrapped in red textile spirals, stretched over aluminium and left to react to Copenhagen's weather. Photo: James Cochrane
All further images as credited in captions.