From serving ice cream to serving looks: Pernille Teisbaek on becoming Scandinavia's It-girl and a mother of four

A ‘honk honk’ signifies the arrival of Pernille Teisbaek, perched in the driver’s seat of a black Range Rover on a quiet Copenhagen block. She is, as ever, the picture of enviable Danish effortlessness – sandy straight-ish hair, rectangular wireframe Gucci glasses, Miu Miu striped polo shirt, relaxed black shorts and a pair of adidas Sambas.

Despite the great outfit, her most notable attribute is her baby bump. It’s a state we’re accustomed to seeing her in; within the past six and a half years, the 39-year-old has been pregnant four times. When we meet, she’s about six months in. “I’ve been more pregnant and breastfeeding than not, which is quite crazy,” says Teisbaek, whose sons Billy Bjoern, Bobby Max and Bruce Vincent are six, four and two respectively. In that time, she and her husband, Philip Lotko, have been through a wedding and two home renovations, not to mention the constant professional obligations that come with being one of Scandinavia’s most prominent and permanent fashion profiles.

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With a whopping 1.4 million followers on Instagram, Teisbaek’s professional life is a flurry of brand partnerships, styling gigs, design collaborations and consulting jobs. Since she launched her blog, Look de Pernille, in 2011, Teisbaek has never once lost momentum, hopping deftly between editing gigs and creative director stints, all while growing her personal brand exponentially. Lotko, who also has his hands full as co-founder of the brand Rains, takes it in stride, pregnancies inclusive. “I’m amazed by him, because it’s not so interesting. I’m tired at eight, I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to go to bed and sleep,” Teisbaek says. “Being pregnant for the fourth time while having three small kids is pretty exhausting.”

Though she’s used to the experience, including the giving birth part, this time is different. She’s having a girl. She first received the news not from her doctor, but from a ‘lightworker’ in Australia.

Teisbaek has always been “quite spiritual” – a direct response to her father passing away from colon cancer when she was just six. “It’s been a way for me to believe in everything in between,” she says. So, a few months ago, when a friend suggested she reach out to Katrina Flokis, an Australian lightworker and healer who counts Rita Ora and Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Christine Centenera as clients, Teisbaek didn’t hesitate.

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It was a lazy Sunday morning and Teisbaek was in bed with her youngest, who was distracted by an iPad, when she took the call. “We start to chat and then she says, ‘Congratulations’,” Teisbaek recalls. “I’m like, ‘Excuse me?’ And she’s like, ‘You’re pregnant! You’re about five weeks or so’.” Teisbaek had hardly told a soul. She asked the reader if she could reveal anything more about the pregnancy, and she responded that “it’s definitely a girl energy that I’m getting”.

Though Flokis had already demonstrated her psychic prowess, Teisbaek wasn’t convinced. “Once you’ve had three boys, you’re pretty sure you’re going to get another boy,” she says. But Flokis took it one step further, saying that she was “getting a name”. “She says the name, and it’s the name we had been talking about for two years,” Teisbaek says. “Even saying it now, I’m having goosebumps.” Shortly thereafter, sitting in the car outside of her house, she opened the doctor’s letter confirming the reader’s prediction and burst into ecstatic tears.

“I see Pernille as an earth angel. She’s an incredible mother and she has goddess energy,” says Flokis when I reach her via Facetime. “She also has something called the divine feminine, and that represents motherhood, it represents the goddess, it represents light, it represents a divine woman, a beautiful wife. She has so many aspects and the way she holds herself is so remarkable – especially being in the public eye.”

“This is where I grew up,” Teisbaek says, pointing to what she accurately describes as a “grey, flat house” to our left. We’re in Charlottenlund, about 30 minutes drive from central Copenhagen. To our right, the ocean. “It was a very nice house to grow up in – we felt very safe and close to the sea,” she says. It’s a stark contrast to the home she now shares with Lotko and her children; the one featured on the cover of Architectural Digest and populated with understated furnishings by Scandinavia’s most sought-after designers (she says that if it were totally up to her, their home would be “completely beige”). Teisbaek grew up with her parents and brother, who is two years her senior (“We’re close – he actually also has three boys,” she says). Her grandparents lived just up the street, in a white Arne Jacobsen-designed apartment complex.

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It was an idyllic childhood until her father got sick. Then it was long stretches spent in the hospital, stress and sadness until he eventually passed. At 18, she moved out. “My mom found a new man and wanted to move in with him and I didn’t want to live with them,” she says. “I was just very young, starting on my own, which was both a good and bad thing. I was probably not ready for it, but it matured me in many ways.” It says something that she wouldn’t want the same situation for her own children. In fact, she says they’re welcome to live with her “until they’re 30”.

Teisbaek pulls into a parking lot by Skovshoved Harbour. Just before we exit the car, I ask her how she feels about having a girl. I anticipate an answer about dressing Bella up in tiny designer clothes and a singular mother-daughter bond. She kills the engine and says something entirely different. “I had always been gravitating towards having a girl, and I couldn’t figure out why. I have such a special relationship with my boys – I love them so much and it’s such a blessing to be a mom to boys because they love you so much, instantly,” she says. “But I was my father’s girl – every picture we have in our album, I’m with him. When he passed away, I had to find my place, and it was more taking care of my mom than being taking care of. When I found out that we were having a girl, I felt that the reason that I really wanted it was because I wanted to experience a girl growing up with her father, because I had never experienced that myself.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment, but Lotko has another perspective. “It was meant to be for us to get our little baby girl,” he says, when I call him up a week later. “Pernille deserves a girl to hang out with in the house – we can use some more female energy inside these four walls.” Those who follow either Teisbaek or Lotko on Instagram know that this is a couple that is deeply, impossibly, in love and not afraid to show it, but it’s still charming to hear him say, with radical seriousness, that his wife is “the best, the coolest, the most beautiful person” he’s ever come across. It’s a belief he held even before they met. “I’d been watching her from afar,” he says. He’d see her at the gym or whizzing by on a bike, always in situations where it wouldn’t be appropriate to approach her. Over time she became somewhat of a dream girl. “I was always drawn to her – she didn’t remind me of anyone else,” he says. “She was always a bit of a mystery, because she never looked my way.”

Around this time eight years ago, Lotko finally met his dream girl at Roskilde Festival, watching Kendrick Lamar. He took her on a date a couple weeks later and proposed five months after that. They had their first child before tying the knot. “We ended up with four kids, a wedding, a couple of houses and apartments,” Lotko says. “But everything is so natural with Pernille.” She’s adapted effortlessly to being a mom of three boys – an experience that Lotko characterises as a lot of “yelling, running, fighting and playing”. “She’s become a soccer mom, but deep within she’s still a princess,” he says. “And I think a princess needs a princess.”

Teisbaek and I exit the car and walk towards a retro-future white structure, formerly a gas station and currently the home of an ice cream shop called Oliver’s Garage. Designed by Arne Jacobsen and built in 1937, the building is said to have served as the genesis of the Danish designer’s iconic Ant Chair. More recently, it was the site of Teisbaek’s first summer job, serving ice cream. “All the girls that were, like…” she pauses to find the appropriate word and I fill it in for her: “Pretty”. She laughs and says, “All those girls were working here.” She was 14 at the time, oft wearing clothes she sewed herself, already establishing the easy minimalist aesthetic that’s come to define her. “All our friends came by on their bikes and rollerblades to hang out, so it didn’t feel like work,” she says. “It was a cute job.” Shortly thereafter she was scouted as a model (commercial jobs and Danish brands and magazines mostly – she was “too short” for international editorial) and hasn’t worked outside the fashion industry since.

As we order two blended iced coffees, Oliver of Oliver’s Garage himself emerges from the back and strides over to give his former employee a bear hug, congratulating her on the forthcoming addition to her family. I ask him if Teisbaek was good at her job and he kind of laughs off the question. They catch up in Danish for a few minutes before he bids us farewell and “good luck on the interview”. “He’s a very nice person,” Teisbaek says, sweetly, as we leave the shop to go take a walk by the water.

Against the backdrop of the rolling waves (and a handful of completely nude bathers running between the sauna and the sea) dressed in that well-curated outfit with the wind blowing through her hair, it’s easy to see why Lotko and over a million others have fallen in love with Teisbaek from afar. According to her, her style has been more or less the same since she was a teen – the relaxed tailoring, covetable knitwear and easy denim. The palette of beige, black and white. The sneakers. She arrived on the international scene right at the dawn of the Tommy Ton-dominated street style boom, at which time her Scandinavian aesthetic was seen as something new and exotic. “A lot of people didn’t even know where Denmark was,” she says. “It was seen as another take on minimalist style.”

All that from-a-distance-love – or that following, rather – translates to big business. A scroll through Teisbaek’s Instagram feed reveals partnerships with Net-A-Porter, Prada, YSL Beauty and Matches (not to mention the shoes of her own design made in collaboration with Gia Borghini). Still, nothing feels forced. Purchased posts are peppered with snippets from Teisbaek’s personal life – her children, her husband, glimpses into her stunning home and enviable travels. Despite their frequent inclusion on her feed, her kids don’t really understand what mom does. “Not so long ago, they got that question at kindergarten,” she says. “And what did they say? My father drinks coffee and my mom sits on the couch all day watching TV. I never watch TV! But they know I’m home all the time and that’s what they would do if they were home.” I tell her I would kill to know what she gets paid for a mention and she demurs, telling me with a laugh that I can “ask her agent”.

In a couple of months, Teisbaek will give birth for what will probably be the last time. “I do it without painkillers,” she says. The most recent two, anyway. “And they’re big. Close to five kilos. We have huge babies.” Still, her deliveries have been relatively, and thankfully, uneventful. This time around she’ll work with the same doula that delivered her youngest and, for the second time, she plans to give birth in a tub. “Being surrounded by something warm to make your body relax kind of makes things go faster and easier, in my experience,” she says. The first two births weren’t especially pleasant, but that last one was “amazing”. She’s a seasoned pro.

“This is probably the last dance,” confirms Lotko. “I think we’re both looking forward to seeing the baby girl this summer and then getting back to not being pregnant.”

Before she drops me off, Teisbaek says something else I didn’t see coming: “I don’t think I’m going to be on social media that much in six years time.” She’s already started applying herself to areas beyond fashion. For starters, there’s her obsession with interior design (“We’ve been in the house now for two years, and now I’ve started to redecorate things a bit”). Additionally, she’s been quietly fundraising for the Boerne Cancer Fonden (which aids with the treatment of children with cancer) through private events, a cause that is near to her heart for obvious reasons. “There are so many aspects of the disease that are awful, and it’s something I’ve really wanted to become involved in in some way,” she says. Earlier this summer, she was announced as an ambassador for the foundation.

But really, no social media? I ask her what she plans to do instead. “I’m going to do something else, I don’t know yet what that is,” she says. “And I really want to be around my kids. Otherwise, we would not have had so many.”