“I need a bit of magic and I need something playful,” said Anne Sofie Madsen when we talked last year, and those qualities, as well as much savoir-faire, were on display in her made-in-Denmark collection for fall 2025. A graduate of the Royal Danish Academy, Madsen spent time working alongside Lee Alexander McQueen and John Galliano before establishing her own line in 2011. She hit the pause button in 2017 to direct her energies towards art. “When I started,” she said, “I didn’t even know if I wanted a brand; I just felt I had something that I wanted to say or something that I could offer that was missing. I never closed my brand: I just didn’t really feel I had anything to say, and then, about two years ago I felt all of a sudden that I did—maybe not with as big gestures as when I was younger.” The intentionality of the new work, made mostly by hand using deadstock and upcycled materials, gave Madsen’s new clothes some of their power.
There were some medieval touches to the collection and the feeling of something untamed, which was balanced by something strict and soignée. There was lavishness here, but also romance, and in the case of bejeweled panties, something transgressive. The spiky, sea urchin-like flourishes were all individual tubes of organza that the designer wanted to look both organic and otherworldly. There were references to smokings and lingerie, and the earthiness of the reworked shearlings contrasted with the cloud lightness of the drapes. Madsen’s poetry is free form, not tied to a specific meter, and it seems she’s always been strong-willed. “When I was studying in Denmark,” she recalled, “there was always a very sort of clean, functionalistic Scandinavian style, and I remember my professor, said [about my designs], ‘Do they all have to be princesses?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe they do.’”
As a reference for this collection, Madsen cited Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which is about reinvention in a general sense. As Madsen’s interest is in the in-between and the amorphous, it makes sense then that her career path hasn’t followed a straight line. At Copenhagen Fashion Week it has been incredibly inspiring to see how Madsen and Astrid Andersen, two experienced female designers and mothers, have chosen when and how to come back to fashion on their own terms.
