Anne Sofie Madsen is a certified veteran of Copenhagen Fashion Week, first showing in the Danish capital in 2011, long before the city’s schedule became just as busy as Paris or Milan. This season, Madsen and her co-creative director, Caroline Clante, took over Odd Fellow Palace, a historic musical hall in the heart of the city – a fitting venue for a show accompanied by a live performance from Danish band, Wedding.

The collection itself revelled in encounters with the supernatural, telling stories of ghosts and ghouls in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Aptly titled Ghostly Matters, the design duo told us, “The situation in the world made creativity feel a little bit hard this season. These diminished horizons, or the ghost of the future, that is promised, but will probably never arrive… We have been talking a lot about ghosts and ghostly matters, being haunted and haunted garments.” Translating that notion of liminality into garments, proportioned pieces played on the line between structured rigidity and free-flowing forms, with silk co-ords walking alongside cocooning duffle coats and tailored suit trousers.

Shapewear underpinned the core of the collection as “a perfect way to actually create ghosts,” Madsen said. “Shape wear is neither a garment nor a body, it’s something in between, and I think this in between is very ghostly in a garment. It’s made out of plastic, but after a few hours it will take on the smell of flesh, so it smells equally artificial and body-like at the same time, which makes it interesting,” she continued. Arriving in various forms, shapewear was layered under or atop garments, encased by draped fabrics or voluminous outerwear, continuing the brand’s interplay of opposites with contrasts of restriction and expansion.

Furthering the idea of ghosts, roses and airbrushing were recurring motifs throughout the collection. “In Scandinavian folklore, the rose is also a symbol of the ghosts; it has a smell that stays in the air. The ghost is also a symbol in the entire world of impermanence,” says Madsen. Seen throughout the collection, adorned across silks, delicately appliquéd onto fabrics or reimagined through airbrushing, the rose offers an alternate view on the idea of impermanence.

On foot, this season saw the design duo debut a seasonal partnership with UGG. Reworking four classic silhouettes with a distinctly Anne Sofie Madsen touch. Materials and patterns from the collection transformed iconic styles such as the Quill Ballet Trainer, arriving encased in leather and accented with shearling shafts, while the Otzo Clog was pierced with metal studs and the Minimel Sneakers were adorned with delicate bows. “We were drawn to how their soft forms could exist between function and
suggestion,” said the designers, using UGG as a medium to translate this season’s fascination with transformation and ambiguity.