Collection: Rains Softies

It rains an average of 120 days a year in Denmark, and the weather is a national conversation topic there. Daniel Brix Hesselager and Philip Lotko meet at the TEKO design and business school — one studies furniture design, the other PR — and together they spot a peculiar gap in the market: a raincoat is either a technical outdoor thing for the mountains or a rubber sack, and you wouldn’t want to wear either on the way to a café. In 2012 they therefore found the brand Rains in Aarhus and start with a single product: a poncho. Their reinterpretation of the classic fisherman’s raincoat follows quickly: lightweight polyurethane fabric with a matte finish, clean Scandinavian lines, unisex cuts and colours that work in the city. No logo across the back, no noise. Just rain solved by design. One poncho grew into an international brand with its own shops across Europe and North America that long ago outgrew raincoats: rolltop rucksacks, travel bags, puffer jackets and accessories, all in the same quiet aesthetic and with the same relationship to water. Rains is a textbook example of the Danish approach to life: take an annoying everyday reality — in this case 120 rainy days a year — and instead of complaining, turn it into style. The minimalist matte-finish raincoat is copied by half the market today. You recognise the original by how little it needs to explain. And by the fact that rain in it stops being a reason to stay home.