IMAGES FALL 2025 Lookbook
Creative director Anne Sofie Madsen
Creative consultant Caroline Clante
Photography Freya Wewer
Art Direction Freya Wewer
Styling Caroline Clante
Casting Caroline Clante
Makeup Gitte Guldhammer
Hair Kirstine Engell
Talent Sara Tekle-Nielsen & Stella Hagerstrand
At the heart of Anne Sofie Madsen lies a kind of purposeful contradiction – a fluid tension between opposing forces: glamour and grit, old and new, masculine and feminine, streetwear and tailoring. It’s a brand defined not by binaries, but by the way those binaries dissolve.
That same spirit runs through the creative partnership at its core. Designer and founder Sofie Madsen and her collaborator Caroline Clante bring two distinct perspectives into constant dialogue. Together, they lead the label with a collaborative energy that’s both intuitive and intentional – and perhaps most of all, driven by duality.
When I speak to the pair in the intense run-up to their Copenhagen Fashion Week show, they’re candid about the creative pressure. “We’re very stressed,” Madsen laughs. “We’re both working nearly full time elsewhere while doing this. I’m also teaching a BA course, and the students’ show is the same day as ours.” Clante adds that she’s simultaneously freelancing on other runway productions. The deadline is shared across roles and projects, but as they both agree, “we’re still having fun.”
This balance between intensity and joy captures something essential about the brand’s current identity, having rejoined the CPHFW schedule last season after a quiet six-year pause. It wasn’t a relaunch so much as a recalibration; a chance to re-enter on their own terms. That show marked the beginning of a new chapter: one defined by partnership, process, and a slower, more deliberate kind of momentum.“We’re still figuring it out,” Clante says of their evolving aesthetic. “It’s not easy to define yet – but that’s part of the point.”
What has become clear is their attraction to contrast. “There’s a fluidity we’re working with,” Madsen explains. “We’re interested in gender codes – not to contrast them, but to blur them. Some pieces lean streetwear: denim, leather, hoodies. Others are more formal: suits, dresses, occasionwear. We want to collapse those boundaries, and explore a wide range of materials and references.” Clante agrees: “We’ve been thinking a lot about glamour versus tackiness. Not just a mash-up of styles, but how to take opposing ideas and make them work together.”
We’re using pieces that are already out there – leather, and denim – things that are hard to produce sustainably but incredibly durable. We’re interested in the idea of giving them new life, especially materials that feel worn, aged, even a little ‘off’ – I love when the material already has a story. There are some colours or washes that you can’t really recreate – they’re just perfect the way they are.
Anne Sofie Madsen
That commitment to contrast is material as well as conceptual. The team utilises upcycling techniques, working with existing materials to reshape and recontextualize. “We’re using pieces that are already out there,” Madsen says. “Leather, and denim – things that are hard to produce sustainably but incredibly durable. We’re interested in the idea of giving them new life, especially materials that feel worn, aged, even a little ‘off’ – I love when the material already has a story. There are some colours or washes that you can’t really recreate – they’re just perfect the way they are.”
This season, the designers leaned into that tension between past and future, beauty and wear. “We love hoodies and caps and sneakers,” Madsen says, “but we also love heels and small dresses and party tops. We’re not one or the other – it’s always both.”
That duality is personal as much as creative. “We design based on what we’re missing,” says Madsen. “What we wish existed, what we want to wear ourselves, what we want the people around us to wear.” The personal bleeds into the professional – the collections often begin with shared references, materials, or even pieces one of them initially resists. “There was something in this collection I thought we couldn’t work with,” Madsen admits, “and then it became a starting point. That kind of push and pull is part of how we work.”
It’s so important to have someone you trust to make decisions with, to challenge you, to share the weight of it.
Caroline Clante
The strength of their partnership – a creative two-headed engine – is something both designers keep returning to. “Never do it alone,” they say, almost in unison, when asked for the advice they would give to emerging designers. “It’s so important to have someone you trust to make decisions with, to challenge you, to share the weight of it.” Clante, who has worked in show production for years, notes the difference this time around. “I’ve done so many shows for other brands, but now it’s our brand. It matters in a different way.”
That feeling extends to the runway show itself. “We’re thinking about how it’ll be on the runway, but we don’t want to design just for that moment. We want the clothes to live beyond it,” says Madsen. “Some pieces are more occasionwear, but every piece is made to be worn – just maybe not all to the supermarket.”
While they’re keeping the narrative of the upcoming collection under wraps until show day, what they do reveal speaks again to their layered, oppositional process. “We’re not inventing anything new,” Madsen says. “We’re trying to fill in [the gaps of] what’s missing by using what is already there. We’re trying to rethink it, as well as remake it.”
Clante adds, “Some of the pieces we’re using are misunderstood – the kinds of things you find in every charity shop, things that people don’t want. But we love that. We want to take what’s been left behind and show what it can become.”
As the fashion world continues to grapple with sustainability, saturation, and shifting ideals of beauty and luxury, Madsen and Clante offer a subtle, subversive way forward – not by rejecting the past, but by remixing it. “It’s not about chasing the new,” Clante says. “It’s about noticing what’s already there, and imagining something else from it.”
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