After taking a pause, Anne Sofie Madsen launched her eponymous label during Copenhagen Fashion Week. “I was participating in a system that no longer aligned with how I wanted to live,” she says
- Who is it? Anne Sofie Madsen is the eponymous label of the Danish designer, who, after taking a pause to pursue other creative projects, is back
- Why do I want it? Meticulously handcrafted garments that blur the lines between couture and wearability, in favour of a deeply personal, time-honoured approach to craft
- Where can I find it? Anne Sofie Madsen is made on demand. For a list of stockists, contact the brand
Who is it? After working abroad for John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, designer Anne Sofie Madsen returned to Denmark with no clear direction. What wasn’t intentional quickly became reality: she launched her eponymous label during Copenhagen Fashion Week’s inaugural season, with a desire to redefine luxury through her own youthful prism. “I didn’t want it to be about wealth or class, but rather craft and storytelling,” she muses. “My first collection had stretch fabrics with trainers – it was luxury through the life I was leading.” Now, after a reflective pause, Madsen is back with a slower, more deliberate vision of luxury – measured in time rather than status. “It’s having the space to spend 100 hours on a piece, to sew it by hand, to dye it myself,” she explains. “I understand that true luxury is being able to slow down.”
Madsen never closed her label; this latest season picks up where she left off in 2018. She crucially recognised that she had simply “run out of things to say” and was “participating in a system that no longer aligned with how [she] wanted to live.” Taking time to recalibrate, she immersed herself in other creative practices, including costume design for contemporary artists. “It’s been really nice spending three months developing one jacket for an art exhibition,” she laughs gently, “which is very different from the pace of fashion.” Illustration, too, allowed her to explore storytelling without the limits of wearability. But this isn’t a relaunch, she clarifies: “I never really left: I just had to find a way to come back on my own terms.”
Her recent collection threads her core themes within this renewed vision of luxury. “I wanted to return to how I started,” Madsen explains. “When I was younger, I spent so much time working with my hands. This was a chance to do that again.” Two draped chiffon dresses revisit silhouettes from her debut collection, while her fascination for historical forms from imagined eras remains. “I think when I was younger, I had a lot to prove. But now I don’t need to fight for a place – I just want to make things that feel right,” she says. “It’s small, handmade and intimate. It feels personal again.”
Why do I want it? Madsen’s work is a sensuous ode to fashion as craft – and not just commerce. Her fantastical designs are grounded in human tactility, with each piece shaped directly by her hands, her patience, and her own sense of time. Such technical investment allows her to structure each garment – and the collection at large – around a series of thoughtful dichotomies: fabric and flesh, past and future, art and function.
Take, for example, Madsen’s fascination for Victorian and 1950s silhouettes – periods bound by rigid ideals of femininity. Through her signature soft, weightless draping, she unlocks these references from their historical constraints, transforming them into fluid and contemporary designs. Embellished nylon stockings and pants oscillate between glamour and kitsch, ornament and function. “Some of these things aren’t really meant to be worn in an everyday sense,” Madsen explains. “They exist for the image, for the world they create.” Elsewhere, shearling coats, constructed from recycled jackets, hold their former histories in their seams, yet are reconfigured according to her artful but instinctively wearable design vocabulary.
In keeping with her steadfast commitment to paced and purposeful production, each order is made on-demand to avoid wasteful stock, and using only deadstock fabrics. All dyeing is done in-house – like on her fantastical tubular top and dress, crafted from bias-cut Afghan silk, sewn into tubes, and dyed with tea. “I want to create in a way that lets me truly enjoy the process,” she says of her personal, hands-on approach. “Hand-stitching on my couch at night, working on draping directly on the mannequin, spending time on the craft itself.”
Madsen envisages a future for her label dictated by creation, not convention – a quiet reflection of fashion’s relentless, often toxic, cycle. In an industry obsessed with speed and visibility, her latest collection is proof that stepping back doesn’t mean fading away – it can mean making some of your best work yet. “In fashion, you’re told that you can’t skip a season, that you’ll disappear if you do. I now know that’s not true.”
Where can I find it? Anne Sofie Madsen is made on demand. For a list of stockists, contact the brand.
