The Former Model Fighting to Make Copenhagen Fashion Week Runways More Inclusive

On the international fashion circuit, Copenhagen Fashion Week's sustainability requirements aren't the only feature that make it an outlier. Attend a few shows, and you'll quickly observe that the casts of runway models aren't all thin, white, and under the age of 30. They're a diverse representation of the women who wear the brands in street style and average, everyday life. The aesthetics of a brand can be uniform—minimal and neutral on one catwalk, punchy and colorblocked on another—but the women wearing them never are.

This attention to inclusive runway casting is partially a standard Copenhagen Fashion Week organizers have set, and partially the effort of women working behind the scenes. One of those women is Mona Ali, the founder of Scandinavia's first Black-owned modeling agency, Fiiri.

Bringing a broader range of women to the runway by every measurable metric isn't just a business matter for Ali. It's personal. Over coffee between shows during Copenhagen Fashion Week during the fall 2025 season, Ali tells me about growing up as a Somalian refugee in Sweden and spending her early career in London in design. Despite being objectively gorgeous, with wide brown eyes and high cheekbones—a fact I couldn't help but notice while sitting right next to her—Ali couldn't quite get her footing on the runway for arbitrary and exclusionary reasons.

"I was always told I was too short," she says. "I was told I was too old—and I was around, like, 27." She didn't have to search far online to see other women with catwalk aspirations being rejected on the basis of their skin tone, size, or age. Or, they'd get cast and encounter an ill-equipped glam team to work with their hair and skin types.

The more Ali heard, the more she wondered, "Who made up these rules that you have to be 175 centimeters and you have to be this way or that way?" So she decided to do something about it.

Ali moved back to Sweden from London and founded Fiiri—Somali for "to see"—in 2019. By the 2021 season, she was signing clients and booking them for major shows across Copenhagen Fashion Week's circuit; then, and for the Fall of 2025, a majority of her clients were non-straight-size models.

In the early seasons and the present, Ali has thought of her role as a "people collector." She seeks out models who aren't like the commercial mold other runways might favor—and finds them plenty of work at a fashion week that prioritizes diversity. In Copenhagen, designers understand "anyone can wear [clothes on a runway], and I think that's slightly different from a designer who might be like, 'This is the look that we're going for,'" she explains. "They're much more open to seeing their designs on more broadened types of women—and people in general."

Ali's guiding hand has connected models with Scandi mainstays like Marimekko, Skall Studio, and TG Botanical. She's been the bridge between models finding their first major jobs and designers broadening their definition of who can walk their runway. Looking back on her five years in business, "The feedback that I've gotten is, 'Since you started Fiiri, we have been seeing more diversity in the shows.'"

Representing underrepresented models has made Copenhagen Fashion Week better but hasn't made it perfect. "There are still some things when it comes to the hair and makeup industry that can improve," Ali says. "It can look nice on the outside, but it also really has to reflect diversity on the inside. I think there's still a lot of work to be done."

Still, relative to other markets, Copenhagen's runways are leagues ahead on the inclusion front. Ali and I met days before New York Fashion Week, one of several markets that, according to a recent Vogue Business study, is guilty of rolling back its size-inclusive casting in recent seasons. As of the Spring 2025 season, only 0.8 percent of looks shown across New York, London, Milan, and Paris were plus-size. I had to ask how Ali perceives the decline in runway diversity around the international fashion community—especially as Copenhagen proves it's possible to do the opposite.

She admitted it's a disappointment and a source of motivation. Ali had grown up dreaming of attending an American high school; shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were how she learned English. Growing up taught her that the reality of the United States didn't necessarily align with what she saw on TV, but she now feels she's in a place to help it get there. (At least, in fashion.) "America's still going to be a huge inspiration [for me], but I really hope we can give them inspiration now in some ways," she says.