Cecilie Bahnsen’s work is the stuff of dreams (literally!). The North Face specializes in real-world hardcore adventure gear.
So, for Spring/Summer 2025, Bahnsen and The North Face bridged a seemingly sizeable gap, devising a collaborative collection of outdoor gear equally bulletproof and demure.
Not like Bahnsen and The North Face were actually all that far-removed. Like girlcore itself, Bahnsen’s label contains multitudes.
Bahnsen’s eponymous label may be synonymous with coquettecore (or balletcore or whatever you wanna call it) but like her girlcore peers, the Danish designer does what she wants. Frilly pink and dainty mary janes are a given but so are austere monochromes, like the all-black weather-resistant outfits Bahnsen designed with The North Face, and techy silver metallics like those that grace her new waterproof ASICS sneakers.
Here, TNF womens’ mountaineering gear like the Mountain Dress and Glenclyffe hiking boot are rendered in single tones, gently blown up in scale and, of course, laden with loads of flora, creating tonal fields of textile flowers.
Dreamy it may be, but the Bahnsen x TNF combo is also real-world useful. So, who better to weigh in on it than actual TNF athletes?
“The collaboration showcased how femininity and performance can crossover and look strong and beautiful at the same time. It was a privilege to wear it on the runway,” Molly Thompson-Smith, a British climbing champion and Olympian, tells Highsnobiety. “I loved wearing pieces where the function and performance element was still a priority, but with a more experimental and fashionable twist.”
Thompson-Smith and fellow pro climbers Brooke Raboutou and Solenne Piret modeled Bahnsen’s TNF line in the SS25 runway show, bringing a little real-world TNF experience to Bahnsen’s elegant exploration of gear ostensibly made for, well, exploration.
These athletes are used to their TNF gear taking a beating in the process of scaling seemingly insurmountable heights. Bahnsen’s offering provded an opportunity to see this stuff in a welcome new light.
“My favorite piece in the collection was the dress that Brooke wore,” Thompson-Smith says. “It was cute and feminine, and the technical features added nicely to the look and feel of the dress. It really felt like bringing fashion and ‘feeling good’ to the outdoor wear I know and love.”