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It may have been 10 days out from her Copenhagen Fashion Week (CPHFW) show — and her first as part of the CPHFW New Talent Programme — but when we sat down over Zoom, designer Anne Sofie Madsen was decidedly chill. She’d been finishing up some garments all morning, evidenced by the pin cushion strapped to her wrist, and was feeling confident about the casting, styling and production for her Tuesday afternoon show.
Unlike many of the young designers inducted into new talent programmes, it’s not Madsen’s first rodeo. The 40-year-old Danish designer launched her eponymous brand in 2011, first showing in Copenhagen and winning the Danish Designer of the Year Award in 2012. At its peak, the label — known for its deconstructed tailoring and easy femininity — had 20 stockists and a regular slot on the Paris Fashion Week calendar (the business quadrupled its retail network its first season in Paris, in 2014). But in 2017, Madsen decided to put her brand on ice.
“It felt like I woke up one day and I wasn’t really sure about why I was doing fashion or running a fashion label anymore,” Madsen says. “I love doing the small practical things, I love to sew and draw. But it got so big; I feel like I’d run out of things to say.” She never truly closed the brand, instead pivoting to contemporary art, illustration and creative consulting on film and TV.
Then, in 2024, she had a change of heart. “I suddenly realised I have something to offer again,” she smiles. So for Autumn/Winter 2025, she made a small, 18-look collection, and tapped stylist and casting director Caroline Clante, who she’d met around Copenhagen, “quite late in the process” to help her pull together a presentation. The duo have full-time jobs: Madsen as head of the Scandinavian Academy of Fashion Design and Clante as a stylist. They wanted to use the presentation to gauge industry feedback.
“People were really into the collection. We couldn’t follow up with the [sample] requests because we got so many,” Clante says. “We thought if this is going so well, then we have to do more.” After the presentation, Clante came on board as co-creative director. The duo collaborate on all decisions, but Madsen focuses on design; Clante on branding and styling.
Working full time alongside the brand has its challenges; Madsen is hoping to pick up a handful of stockists this season so she and Clante can hire additional team members to help develop the next collection. “Time and money is a challenge right now, but it’s also kind of a positive thing,” Madsen says. “We want this to grow, but we’re not in a hurry.”
The duo applied for the CPHFW New Talent scheme after last season and were accepted, receiving financial and operational support to make their debut as Anne Sofie Madsen 2.0. Fashion weeks don’t typically favour smaller brands that take breaks from the calendar and then return. Brands are encouraged to keep showing every season. In Paris, brands typically show multiple seasons off-schedule to prove to the fashion council their staying power. But Copenhagen is taking a different approach to the idea of ‘new’ talent. Madsen follows Astrid Andersen, who returned to fashion last year with brand Stel after pausing her eponymous menswear label in 2021.
“It’s a startup all over again,” says Madsen. “It’s very nice to be part of every single little detail about the show for the first one, even organising lighting or looking for benches. I ended up in a place where I wasn’t handling all these matters myself, right? My staff did this before, so I forgot how it feels.”
“Then, next season, hopefully we can pay people to help us,” Clante adds with a smile.
But even as the brand scales, Madsen and Clante are keen to stay hands-on, and Madsen is learning to say no to ensure things progress slowly. “I said yes to so many things the first time around. Caroline is really good at saying no and reminding me that we can,” she says.
Building versatile appeal
For her second act, the designer wanted to maintain the brand’s central ethos, which was ultra-feminine, structural designs, adapted for comfort and ease, like a lace-up corset made with stretch fabric, so you could “wear it to a rave and ride home on your bike”. A jersey dress is versatile enough to be worn for a night out and then tossed in the washing machine.
Madsen and Clante are different in age but similarly versatile in their approaches to dressing, which is informing the brand’s new product. “In the studio, we will be in jeans and T-shirts and trainers and often baseball caps. But also both of us really enjoy dressing up in sassy dresses and extremely high heels,” Madsen tells me. “We have a specific customer, but I believe that she is a little bit like us in that way, she can be any age, and she dresses for different occasions.”
Pieces are sampled in the studio, and Madsen has tapped old suppliers across Europe, including Denmark and Italy, to make the collections if they sell.
“Someone told us to choose one direction. We were like, ‘That makes sense, but no,’” Clante says. “We’re following our guts.”
“We hope that when this is met by buyers, they will see the collection [working] in many different ways,” Madsen adds. “That’s our goal.”
While Madsen and Clante are keen for a few stockists, they’re also building a made-to-order occasionwear business, to work with clients directly and make special pieces in Copenhagen, to supplement revenue from wholesale. “I know that the market is very different from when I started the first time around — retail is very different. There’s a lot more brands now,” Madsen says.
The upcoming collection will be a graduation of the presentation collection, with some of the pieces developed based on existing silhouettes that people enjoyed from AW25. Madsen and Clante also explored upcycling archival pieces from the brand in last season’s collection, like shearling coats patched together, and got a “great response”, encouraging them to keep experimenting with splicing pieces from the archive.
As for the show, it’s going to be “very simple”, Madsen says, but with some surprises. “We might do things differently next time, but for this first show, it’s going to be a lot about the garments and how the models move.”
“They’re going to fill out the space,” Clante adds. “We will have some set design, but it’s not our main focus. Our focus is the characters on the runway.”
Looking ahead, Madsen and Clante have a simple long-term ambition for Anne Sofie Madsen. “We want to have fun,” they both answer when asked about their long-term goal. “Both those answers came straight from the heart,” Madsen says. “Hopefully, we can have fun, live a good life, earn money and grow slowly and mindfully.”
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