Reykjavik–These Icelanders sure know how to put on a show.

I was mere minutes into the Reykjavik Fashion Festival when I realized I might be watching a simulated snuff film while seated in the subterranean parking garage of the city’s Harpa Opera House where the week’s first show, Mundi, was taking place. The short flick featured a post-apocalyptic gang of well-dressed hooligans in bold patterned wool knits riding rough shod over the Icelandic highlands on the stocky yet self-assured Icelandic horse (a Viking breed that you mustn’t call a pony lest you upset the locals). At their destination they electrocute a man using energy from the country’s indigenous hot springs (so eco, so green, so wrong).

It primed the viewer for Mundi’s collection of Hunger Games-chic knits and outerwear. Well known in Iceland as a child prodigy, designer Gudmundur Hallgrimsson (who prefers the single moniker Mundi) hand crafted the weaponry used in his show: Bows, arrows and axes. The addition of dirt smeared on models’ faces–faces set with scowls that could kill a child–put the odds ever in Mundi’s favor.

Photos: Reykjavik Fashion Festival except where otherwise noted