Caroline Ryan grew up in a thatched cottage in the village of Boherbue in north Cork, one of a family of four whose father had returned from New Zealand to live in Ireland as a teenager. A photographer and brand consultant, Ryan now lives and works in Copenhagen, her base an early 18th-century converted cargo warehouse in Christianshavn, one of the city’s liveliest neighbourhoods with a hip cafe culture and canals. Danish supermodel Helena Christensen lives in an apartment nearby.
Always interested in working in the fashion industry, Ryan studied international fashion promotion in Manchester and interned with Wolford in Austria during her placement year in 2018. Hired as their social media editor, she worked with them remotely from Manchester during her degree and for six months after graduation.
Later that year, she got a job in social media with Mytheresa, a leading German online luxury fashion marketplace, in Munich where she worked and lived for nearly two years. “Fashion promotion,” she explains, ‘involves content creation, styling, photography, art direction – everything other than making clothes.”
In 2020, she joined Malene Birger, the eponymous Danish label founded by the artist and designer in 2003, as social media manager and moved into the role of creative content manager during the rebranding of By Malene Birger.
“I wasn’t that passionate initially about social media as you need to have a visual and analytical mind and you need to be able to write. You need all these things in one but at Malene Birger I grew to like it”.
She moved to the Danish capital in February 2020 and immediately fell in love with the city. “It’s like Disneyland compared to Munich,” she says, “and Danes are like kittens compared to Munich where people will not shy away from telling you what to do. Moving here immediately resonated with me.”
Having done photographic work for the Swedish brand Rodebjer, she joined the company in 2023 working remotely from Copenhagen and remains with them, travelling to the Swedish capital once a month.
“I shoot everything on an iPhone and, as we are selling clothes, we are mixing ‘lookbook’ campaign imagery with more realistic social media. The campaign images get hundreds of likes but the iPhone images always do better with thousands of likes and that helps to grow the brand quite a lot and seems to engage people more.”
She combines her job with working part-time as a freelance photographer as well as brand consulting. Some of her clients include Malene Birger, Remain Birger Christensen and Birrot, a Korean-Danish brand due to show on the official schedule at Copenhagen Fashion Week next season.
Her apartment, which she shares with her partner Simon Brody, a music therapist, is on the second floor of the building and she explains that “in Copenhagen when you pay your [rental] deposit, you know that at the end of your lease they will subtract the cost of repainting and re-sanding the floorboards, so it comes out of your deposit”.
Though she loves living in the city, she finds the language difficult and admits that “I am not super proud of not being able to speak Danish. It took a while to distinguish between Swedish and Danish”, though that has not stopped her making many friends.
“Danish people have a reputation for being colder and a little bit difficult and can be slow to open up but I have had amazing conversations with people locally here, so it is what you make of it. Their humour can be similar to ours and is quite dry, but the fashion industry is very international.
“In Denmark, there is a lot of respect for free time and work-life balance is very important. You can have a full day after the office.
“Danes have a universal level of appreciation of design and no one is trying to do better than anyone else.
“In summer you can go for a swim and have a glass of wine afterwards and there is a real village feeling here in Christianshavn. Danes tend to eat at home, as dining out can often be dangerously expensive. When friends visiting from home see in euros what they have paid in krone, they often get a shock”, she says, adding though that “the food scene here is amazing”.
Her sister, Deborah, who is a TU culinary arts graduate, is also working in the city as a food photographer, host and founder of the Copenhagen Cookbook Club. She is studying for a masters at Copenhagen University.
“I have grown to love living here as you really feel you have choices, though I don’t want to be doing the Danish winter in February when you know there are another two months of it.”
