Originally published 2009 on Urban Socialite. Revisited March 2026.
There are designers you cover because you're supposed to and designers you cover because you literally cannot stop looking at their work. Camilla Skovgaard was firmly in the second category.
Danish-born, Royal College of Art trained, Skovgaard built an eponymous shoe line that landed at Saks Fifth Avenue before she even graduated. Her work explored the line between elegance and brutality: architectural soles, fluid edges, materials as considered as the form. She received the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship for excellence in British craftsmanship in 2007. By 2009 she was in 176 locations across 33 countries: Harvey Nichols, Joyce, Net-a-Porter. Nominated for Accessories Designer of the Year at the 2010 British Fashion Awards. One of the most exciting designers working.
And then she stopped.
Camilla Skovgaard was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and passed away that December in Denmark. She was 45.
Before she got sick, she had already been questioning the fashion cycle. She moved to Ibiza in 2014, started living differently, and began a new project called Of Origin (.OO.): a brand built around jute and flax, no animal products, no seasonal collections, just slowly made things hand-stitched in Spain with real environmental commitment. A complete departure that was completely coherent with who she had become.
Her original shoes now surface at The RealReal, Poshmark, and eBay, treated as collector's items by people who understood what they were looking at when she was still alive.
Camilla Skovgaard built something extraordinary by conventional metrics, then walked away from it because it no longer made sense to her: ethically, environmentally, personally. She wasn't chasing relevance. She was following what she actually believed.
Independent designers talk a lot about building brands that reflect their values. Camilla Skovgaard actually did it, twice, in completely different directions. The first made her famous. The second made her herself. That's worth something. (Naketano made a version of the same choice, and I wrote about that too.)
Her final project: Of Origin