“This time it’s personal,” this famous film line describes Marlene Malling’s approach to La Bagatelle, the clothing brand she launched nearly three years ago. Spring 2025 marked the label’s first season on the Copenhagen Fashion Week calendar, and Malling worked magic to create a wearable-now collection (see below) inspired by late-summer wheat fields and made up of precious, partly vintage textiles in a fruity palette of raspberries and cherries with touches of gold.
Sounds like a dream come true, right? Especially if you’re looking for something unique, local, and classic rather than directional. La Bagatelle is hard to describe as a brand, because it wasn’t conceived that way and has its own way of existing in the fashion world. Part of that is because Malling approaches it from a journalist’s perspective. “I never wanted to be a designer,” she says, “but I’ve always loved clothes more than anything.”
Born in Denmark, she moved to London as a teenager, where she earned a master’s degree in fashion history. “I’ve always been fascinated by the stories that can be told with clothes,” she says. Malling weaves stories from a variety of perspectives, including as a reporter covering shows, editor-in-chief of the short-lived Elle Denmark and Bonnier Publications’ Bonnier’s Costume magazine, and creative director of fast-fashion company Vero Moda. The advertising agency owner is best known as the publisher of Danish style magazine Cover, which she ran from 2005 to 2017, and its offshoots Cover Kids, Cover Man, and The Horse Rider’s Journal. Not surprisingly, words had something to do with the founding of La Bagatelle.
The company could be described as a “corona baby” because the idea started to come together during the hectic months of the COVID-19 lockdown. Taking a break from writing her book, Maring came across a treasure trove of vintage fabrics, bought from a man who’d collected them on his travels through Nepal and Japan in the ’70s. “They had little rolls of fabric lying around in their office, on their breaks. I didn’t have a deadline, so I took a few breaks,” she recalls. “I thought, I’d love to make something beautiful out of this fabric. One day I wrote online, ‘Do you know any tailors?’ And people wrote to me. So I decided: I’ve been asking people, so I have to respond. That’s how this work started. It was a very intuitive feeling, a desire to do something very personal.”
At Chez La Bagatelle, it all starts with the textiles. Jackets might be made from century-old Japanese fabrics, and dresses are often embellished with Spanish wedding lace. “What I want to do is to speak to the textiles, to have a conversation,” Malling says. The silhouettes are traditional and optimized for layering, and the overall vibe is a little bit bohemian, a little bit ’70s plastering. There aren’t many styles, but they are reimagined in different materials. And each piece is named after a specific person, such as the Rampling pants (after Charlotte) in velvet with an elasticated waist, the Loulou pencil skirt, the Didion jacket (after Joan), the Bendix shirt (after a close friend), and the Bisset vest (after Jacqueline). The fabrics are sourced from all over the world, but they’re all locally produced in Copenhagen, picked up from the tailors and transported by bike to the studio. “When my team comes in with the bikes loaded up, people don’t believe it, so I think I’ll actually take a picture of it, but that’s the reality.”
