by MILAN – “Stem’s mission is really to reduce waste in fashion and open people’s eyes to the production process,” said brand founder and textile designer Sarah Brunnhuber.
As for her own eyes, they were teary-eyed as she listened to a video call on Thursday afternoon, just after finding out she had won the annual Wessel & Vett Fashion Prize. Designed as Denmark’s answer to the LVMH Prize, the award which has previously been awarded to the likes of Anne Sofie Madsen, Cecilie Bahnsen, A. Roege Hove and Saks Potts, is aimed at fostering sustainable brands and supporting local and international growth for the most part . promising fashion talents in Scandinavia.
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Brunnhuber beat out three other finalists – Skall Studio, OpéraSport and Sunflower – with her unique fashion offering and quiet rebel vision.
Committed to transformative change in the fashion industry, her Stem brand offers crafty garments with distinctive asymmetric edges developed through advanced weaving, efficient cutting and meticulous sewing to reduce waste. The brand forgets the seasonality of fashion and follows production at a slow pace, focusing on making designs and shapes that can stand the test of time, from fringed shirts to textured dresses.
Brunnhuber presented her zero-waste woven work, business strategy and overall vision to a jury at Henrik Vibskov’s studio in Copenhagen. In addition to the Danish designer, the founder of the award was Nina Wedell-Wedellsborg; chief executive officer of Copenhagen Fashion Week Cecilie Thorsmark; Co-founder of Ganni Nicolaj Reffstrup; Marimekko creative director Rebekka Bay and creative consultants Silas Adler and Shila Gaonkar, among others.
“Sarah’s innovative one-waste system is a groundbreaking achievement in sustainable fashion,” read a chorus from the panels. “Based in Copenhagen, Stem focuses on transparency and the use of environmentally friendly materials to minimize waste. It is a perfect example of how fashion is evolving, where production, design and branding come together to create a future-oriented business. For us on the jury, Stem is a brand – it represents the future of the fashion industry.”
“Sarah’s commitment to sustainability and creativity makes her work very clear, and this award is recognition of her visionary approach. We look forward to seeing how Stem continues to shape the industry for years to come,” continued the statement, which concluded by recognizing Brunnhuber “as a true pioneer” and with the jurors offering her “support as you going forward.”
“That means a lot, it’s a huge stamp of approval for my work: it makes me so excited for the future of Stem and the future of the fashion industry as well. I feel inspired and proud of myself,” Brunnhuber told WWD.
As the winner of the award, formerly known as the Magasin du Nord Fashion Prize and supported by Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, the designer will receive a cash prize of 500,000 Danish kroner (or 67,000 euros) and, as part of the ongoing sponsorship and collaboration with Copenhagen Fashion Week, complementary slots on the official show and presentation schedule for the fashion event’s fall 2025 and spring 2026 seasons. She will also be able to participate in the Copenhagen Fashion Week symposium in London during London Fashion Week in June 2025.
Brunnhuber has a clear vision of how she intends to invest the prize money.
“For the last eight or so months, I have been working towards setting up my own weaving mill here in Denmark … a huge task to undertake, but also very exciting,” she said. She shared the concept with the jury as part of her presentation, which featured key pieces from the three collections the designer has developed since 2021; fabrics and handwoven samples that inspire those garments as well as boxes with samples from the last five years and a book looking back on the brand’s journey.
“[The mill] always in the back of my mind. It was a dream come true to have my own production,” she said. “The last few years of working with the current manufacturing system have made me realize how much it has to change: we need to produce something like 75 percent less as an industry to meet our climate goals but the systems are not in place to. do this. So the idea with the mill is that we try to produce less efficiently and work towards more circular practices locally here in Denmark.”
The designer noted that there are currently no weaving mills for the fashion industry in the country. “It was only in the ’60s-70s that there was a flourishing textile manufacturing culture here, which completely disappeared, so it’s very exciting to try to bring that back,” she said, adding express that the mission is to try to “do. systemic change across the industry and also really locally to create that infrastructure here.”
She said the project will have an educational component to “work with students, brands and anyone who wants to learn more about technical manufacturing and make production more accessible” as the overarching goal is to “help with others actually more responsible production.”
The project will be an extension of Stem, which Brunnhuber plans to further strengthen by investing part of the prize funding to expand the team. “It’s mostly me now and I have some help but it’s a great opportunity to think of someone else working full-time towards the same goal,” she said. “That will really allow a lot of the other research projects I do and other techniques I’m working on to come forward as I develop that mill project, so I can split my time between the both.”
Experimentation is at the heart of the brand’s ethos. Stem came from Brunnhuber’s innovative work at Design Academy Eindhoven, where she started weaving in her first semester and hasn’t stopped since.
Her epiphany was when she watched the 2015 documentary “The True Cost” in a flash. “I know it was a big turning point for a lot of people but for me it really had this huge impact and when I looked at that, I couldn’t see what I had seen and did it was clear to me that I wanted to commit. my livelihood to improve this industry.”
She developed her zero-waste production technique during her degree semester and later industrialized it. She progressed through collaborations in London and Prato, Italy, before finally settling in Copenhagen.
Today, she continues to take time throughout the year to weave and explore new techniques and materials, such as elastic wool, which help her “justify the development of new collections”.
But the biggest challenge in running his indie label now is dealing with the status quo in general. “It’s very difficult to try to do things differently when there are just old systems in place and you know that stands across the industry. It’s not just in manufacturing, it’s how the wholesale system works, how retail works, how the calendar of the year is because there are so many systems that kind of need to be dismantled a little bit and we are trying to do that while making it worthwhile. clothes,” she said.
“It’s difficult. I think I just find it hard to do anything new. So that’s a challenge, because there’s so much being produced,” she continued.
Although distribution is still in its infancy, Stem’s collections are primarily available online at the brand’s e-commerce. Brunnhuber also revealed that she will open a showroom next to her studio in Copenhagen next week to enable local customers to experience the brand and the fabrics and try on the collections when they are designed.
Each with a different approach to fashion, the competition’s four finalists were revealed during Copenhagen Fashion Week in August and were selected based on criteria such as design talent, sustainable credentials and viable business strategy.
Conducted by the Wessel & Vett Foundation and now in its 12th year, the prize has kept its recent focus on integrating more established brands and experienced designers with emerging talents from last year. However, Skall Studio by sisters Julie and Marie Skall and OpéraSport design duo Stephanie Gundelach and Awa Malina Stelter are now regulars on the Copenhagen fashion calendar and the Danish fashion scene. As for Sunflower, the contemporary menswear brand was founded in 2018 by Ulrik Pedersen and Alan Blond.
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