On the S/S 2026 version of Copenhagen Vogue Week final month – the most important to this point – it was tough to know the place the catwalk ended and the road started. Provocatively, it was a season of garments that regarded good, happy the seated audiences and didn’t want an esoteric bibliography to clarify them. After virtually 20 years, town has established itself because the place for trend that matches life; trend with out the footnotes.
The week noticed the return of certainly one of Denmark’s breakout stars. Anne Sofie Madsen launched her eponymous model in 2011, exhibiting in Paris for six years earlier than taking a break in 2017, dropping herself within the fugue of manufacturing 4 collections a 12 months. ‘I used to be simply managing issues. At all times travelling, by no means actually draping or drawing. I misplaced contact with all the pieces that made me need to turn out to be a designer,’ she says. ‘This time I promised myself that I actually need to be the particular person sitting on the stitching machine. I need to do embroideries and material manipulation; the bodily a part of trend was all the time what I used to be actually into.’
SAFD: designing the way forward for Copenhagen Vogue Week
Anne Sofia Madsen’s S/S 2026 assortment, which was proven at Copenhagen Vogue Week after an eight-year break. Alongside her label, she teaches final-year college students on the Scandinavian Academy of Vogue Design (SAFD)
(Picture credit score: James Cochrane)
Madsen hasn’t proven in Copenhagen since 2013. Now she’s again working formally with stylist and casting director Caroline Clante and their assortment was crammed with a buzzy, off-kilter glamour. Clothes coded with old school that means have been remixed and repositioned. The town’s trend week now boasts a a lot larger schedule, and a a lot brighter highlight. ‘I feel that perhaps this present wouldn’t have occurred if I wasn’t working with Caroline. This was her first assortment, and a return for me. And we had a blast,’ Madsen says two weeks after the present.
Alongside operating her label, Madsen has been educating for greater than a decade, first on the Royal Danish Academy, and extra not too long ago on the Scandinavian Academy of Vogue Design (SAFD), the place she works with final-year college students. In operation since 1931, SAFD provides just one course – a full-time three-year BA in trend design, delivered by 4 members of workers – and accepts solely 30 college students per 12 months. The campus is situated inside a typical Copenhagen residence constructing on high of a Lego retailer on Badstuestræde – an space recognized for having one of many longest pedestrian purchasing streets in Europe.
‘You do surprise how one can add one thing new to this scene, one thing thrilling that isn’t simply what you’d see somebody sporting on the road’
Clara Maria Kreisberg, a current SAFD graduate
‘It’s humorous as a result of in the event you’re on the road, you don’t have any thought what’s occurring within the rooms above you – we’re at our little desks, engaged on our tasks,’ current graduate Clara Maria Kreisberg says. ‘As a pupil it actually feels so unusual in Copenhagen. You do surprise how one can add one thing new to this scene, one thing thrilling that isn’t simply what you’d see somebody sporting on the road,’ she provides. ‘Anne Sofie and the college encourage us to be a bit extra excessive, a bit extra wild.’
Two appears from Kreisberg’s assortment have been proven through the week as a part of SAFD’s graduate present, which was organised fully by the scholars themselves. Her venture was primarily based on the Norway-born Hollywood starlet and ballet dancer Vera Zorina. Kreisberg targeted on making extraordinarily glamorous and costly garments that had a worn-in, worn-out actuality. Think about an infinite jacket that’s painfully well-made with layers upon layers of tainted ribbons.
A ribbon jacket by current SAFD graduate Clara Maria Kreisberg
(Picture credit score: Clara Maria Kreisberg)
As a matter of satisfaction, SAFD focuses on development and sample making – the laborious abilities – for the primary two years of research. ‘That may typically put a little bit of a damper in your ambitions as a result of you will have three days to make one thing your self, so, how loopy are you able to go! However in direction of the top we have been motivated to make one thing new and enjoyable and thrilling as a result of in any other case why even hassle?’ Kreisberg says.
Madsen – by all accounts – is a troublesome however nurturing tutor. Bold for every of the scholars, wanting to untangle their full potential. ‘I usually consider trend as a type of foolish aunt to all the opposite inventive fields,’ she says. ‘What I actually get pleasure from about educating is we’re all the time questioning all the pieces collectively: what are we doing, and why are we right here? Being in a world that may be very ugly at instances, it’s crucial to have discussions about whether or not magnificence can have a type of activist potential.’
‘What I actually get pleasure from about educating is we’re all the time questioning all the pieces collectively: what are we doing, and why are we right here?’
Anne Sofie Madsen
Educating is a really giving occupation. Madsen says that what she enjoys is the sense that she’s concerned within the manufacturing of one thing intangible; not simply the garments the scholars present on the finish of the three years however their approach of transferring and pondering by the world.
The staging of Madsen’s personal present – conceived by the founders of Issueissue journal, Freja Wewer and William Becker – took inspiration from Sofia Coppola’s cult brief Lick the Star. To evoke the movie’s hazy unfurling of early girlhood, the fashions circled a taxonomy of bodily objects laid onto the ground: a well-worn E.T. film T-shirt, a cloudy snow globe with a inexperienced snake inside, an ornamental candle stick holder, three empty plastic bottles, a replica of Film journal from September 1962 with Otto Preminger on its cowl, a 1991 paperback version of Ronnie Spector’s biography, a portrait of Tristan Tzara, a used ash tray, a lacquered striped shirt, a bejewelled rat and large costume diamonds. It was a riposte to the convenience of AI-sullied scrolling and screenshotting, which dominates analysis throughout the inventive industries right this moment.
A glance by Anine Hundsbaek Lykke Smed, who needed to problem physique beliefs along with her graduate assortment
(Picture credit score: Anine Hundsbaek Lykke Smed, photographed by Nikoline Ranek)
‘Anne Sofie all the time says that our dictionary is photographs,’ Alberte Hundsbæk Lykke Smed says. One other graduate from this 12 months, her assortment targeted on the distinctive place she discovered herself in learning alongside her twin sister, Anine. ‘After all, you can not escape being a twin; we’re two completely different people however a part of a unit.’ Alberte’s assortment checked out redefining pairs and exploding concepts of multiples. One in every of her clothes was a high with a bra that had three cups relatively than the standard two.
With Madsen she discovered a method to translate her analysis – a collection of collages of New York workplace staff by Hans Eijkelboom, and Petra Collins’ 2019 e-book Why Be You When You Can Be Me? – throughout each a part of her decision-making. ‘She [Anne Sofie] could be laborious on us. She’s a dictionary herself; she all the time has an thought in the event you want that one very last thing. What she actually did was assist the garments converse for themselves,’ Lykke Smed says. ‘You’re pushing 200 or extra sketches and also you need assistance to slim it down. I’m nonetheless reaching out to her for recommendation on what to do subsequent.’ Anine can be determining what’s subsequent. Her venture aimed to problem physique beliefs, with padded donuts added to the hips and across the waist.
The gathering of Anine’s twin sister Alberte Hundsbaek Lykke Smed checked out redefining pairs and exploding concepts of multiples
(Picture credit score: Alberte Lykke Smed Bachelor, photographed by Nikoline Ranek)
Madsen’s personal assortment was a much-needed jolt of pizazz throughout the scope of all the pieces else proven through the week. ‘I actually appreciated how among the items have been a bit deconstructed, however then you will have the bling, the chains,’ Anine says. ‘I assumed it was a bit Eighties with the blue tights, after which with the rat bag – that’s playful! That’s bringing artwork into trend, which is one thing the business is missing proper now. Anne Sofie did one thing that was sudden.’
With its edited appears, rustled-up pointy sneakers and the fashions’ pressing stride, the SAFD present had a wily freshness to it. It was deliciously artful, out of step with what was occurring at road stage beneath. In opposition to the backdrop of a metropolis famed for its manicured, mesmerising togetherness, it was even somewhat punk. Madsen says: ‘Some younger folks I meet have misplaced perception within the values of the Western world – which appears like a really massive factor to say, however the conversations we’ve had have actually moved me. With respect to what’s occurring around the globe, I’ve been each devastated and dissatisfied. I’m not an optimistic particular person, however I’m an idealistic one. Increasingly, I feel the vital factor for me to do is to encourage the scholars in direction of idealism. It doesn’t matter what their objectives are.’
copenhagenfashionweek.com
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