The Cheap Monday look—the skinniest of skinny jeans—stays its course season after season, but for Fall, the blues are going gray. The Swedish label showed an almost entirely gray collection during Stockholm fashion week yesterday (its second with new creative director Ann-Sofie Back) that drew on some unlikely inspirations. “We were thinking a bit about the apocalypse, but with a feeling of hope,” said founding designer Örjan Andersson. “And of construction sites. We think construction sites are beautiful.” That may explain the city-street palette, as well as the silvery white hair and makeup accents, as if the models had trudged through the concrete dust of a live site without benefit of a hard hat. (The stiff bouffants worn by both guys and girls might’ve eliminated the need for those.) Back, for her part, played with proportion, cut, and layers but kept to the understated Cheap Monday aesthetic. “With my own collection, people always want more designed bits,” the Swedish-born designer told us. “If people buy Back, they want to show it. But sometimes I feel like you just need a pair of black pants.”

—Ana Finel Honigman

Photo: Kristian Löveborg

There was plenty of grooving at Stockholm Fashion Week this year, where the Swedes showed their collections to an indie rock beat. A live piano concert—shades of Cat Power—attended Filippa K’s noirish collection of pencil skirts, structured dresses, and tilted fedoras in the Museum of Photography, and the crowded scene at Cheap Monday in the Frihamnshallen had the feel of an arena concert. In fact, almost every presentation was held at the Berns, the nineteenth-century hotel-cum-concert-hall where most of the guests were staying. (Good news, that, given that persistent snowdrifts would have made the usual fashion-week runaround pretty unpleasant.) The exception proved the rule at Hope, the week’s highlight, held in the gilded Royal Dramatic Theatre (pictured). As guests sampled delicacies from the Fårö region of Gotland and a second tier of onlookers snapped photos from an upstairs gallery, the two designers gave brief, scholarly explanations of how their crisp, beautifully tailored men’s and women’s wear reflected the influence of Ingmar Bergman’s art-house classic The Seventh Seal, from hooded sweaters meant to evoke Death’s cape to checkerboard prints suggesting his famous chess match. It wasn’t the usual soundtrack for the runway, but the beats were barely missed.

—Ana Finel Honigman

Photo: Kristian Loveborg / Courtesy Berns Salonger

Until last week, Cheap Monday denim designer Carl Malmgren had never set foot in New York City. “Yeah, it’s my first time here,” he admitted as Cheap Monday colleagues went about hanging pairs of jeans from the ceiling of the new Inven.tory store on Lafayette Street. “Just one of those things, I guess.” Inven.tory marks the fifth stop on an international denim tour for the brand, and the jeans Malmgren et al. were hanging are numbered, limited-edition, hand-patched, and distressed pairs that go on sale tonight for the standard Cheap Monday price of $70. “The other times we’ve done this, the lines have been down the block,” Malmgren recalled. “Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, Berlin, it’s always been crazy. All together, we’re only making about 350 pairs. I think people have a hard time believing that we’d sell them for the regular price.” In addition to the sale, Inven.tory, which opens officially tomorrow, is hosting an extensive Cheap Monday pop-up, the first time all the Cheap Monday ranges will be under one roof—at least in the United States. “It did take us a while to get over here,” noted Malmgren. “We thought it ought to have been worth the wait.”—Maya Singer

With its affordable price points and cool cuts, Stockholm-based Cheap Monday quickly became one of the most well-known and well-liked denim companies out there. But as its Spring 2010 show in the Swedish capital proved on Monday night, the brand is now about much more than affordable jeans. Its first step in that direction was to bring London-based designer Ann-Sofie Back to Stockholm; its second step was to apply denim techniques like stone-washed whiskers, slashes, and rips to non-denim materials like jersey dresses and sweat suits. Back’s move to the brand is a recent one. In an interview earlier today, she admitted that this collection only bore some of the changes she plans to bring to the brand. “I’m looking forward to doing new and interesting things with the whole brand and to take it well beyond the denim world,” she said. Joining a denim brand to design more than denim isn’t the only weird concept I encountered in Stockholm on this trip: I met Sweden’s biggest model export, Caroline Winberg, who opened Cheap Monday’s show, for a drink after the festivities and promised myself I’d be home before sunset—which just happened to be at 11:30 p.m.—Derek Blasberg

Photo: Courtesy of Cheap Monday

The Swedish denim label Cheap Monday has put a new spin on that old question by sewing “Increase the Peace” patches onto its beloved skinny jeans. Available in two colors, very stretch black and very stretch one wash (blue), they’ll be sold exclusively at Barneys New York stores beginning on Election Day, November 4. No, buying a pair won’t help the situation in Iraq or Afghanistan, but at $65, they just might ease the situation in your wallet.

—Nicole Phelps

Attention, all bathing beauties in Miami for Art Basel: You might want to delay the purchase of a new bikini until May. That’s when Cheap Monday will be debuting its first-ever swimsuits at Urban Outfitters, and true to the company’s name, they’re priced for thrift. A zippered bandeau-top bikini in black, coral, or electric blue will ring up at $45—or nine bucks less than the cost of a cab to JFK (our math includes tip and tolls). Making the Fontainebleau poolside scene in last summer’s swimwear? Free. Hailing a taxi back from the airport instead of lugging your suitcase and hungover self onto the subway? Priceless.—Maya Singer

Photo: Courtesy of Cheap Monday