For the brand’s second show on the official Copenhagen Fashion Week calendar under the NewGen umbrella, Anne Sofie Madsen and newly appointed co-creative director Caroline Clante lean into the persistence of a lost future – finding beauty in the macabre as they cement themselves as collaborative masterminds and one of the most compelling names emerging from the Nordics right now.

Last season, rat-shaped bags scurried down the runway at Anne Sofie Madsen during Copenhagen Fashion Week. This January, it was UGG boots – naturally, with a twist. Metal bear claws protruded from the toes; belts coiled around calves; airbrushed, phantasmagoric forms warped the familiar shearling silhouette. It’s practically a house signature at this point: who doesn’t love a slightly freakish accessory? And yet they never overwhelm. Instead, they perform as scene-stealing supporting actors to the brand’s obtuse shoulders, surgically precise drapery and those extremely covetable jackets that have become an ASM calling card.

For AW26, however, the macabre carried a different gravity. Presented inside a historic Freemasons’ hall – owned by a male society for over a century and partially destroyed by fire in the 90s – the collection unfolded as a meditation on a haunted, aborted future. Aptly titled Ghostly Matters, it found poetry in neglect. “It’s a place nobody has actually paid attention to for, I mean, eight years,” Madsen tells us the morning after the show. Just hours earlier, we had been seated beneath the cracked ceilings of the once-regal building in central Copenhagen. “We liked how the place is supposed to look fine, but it’s super trashy – golden chairs in plastic, scratched floors, slightly abandoned.”

Soundtracked by Copenhagen-based neo-punk band Wedding (yes, that’s really their name) the collection continued a narrative first introduced at Madsen’s NewGen debut two seasons ago. This time, though, there’s a palpable shift. With Clante now installed as co-creative director, the brand is visibly flexing new muscles.

“I think because we’re both holding full-time jobs, it was quite difficult to actually begin this collection. Research felt tough this season,” Clante explains, reflecting on the early stages of AW26. “And there was something about the state of the world that made creativity feel harder,” Madsen adds. “Maybe it’s these diminished horizons – or as we wrote in the press text, the ghost of the future that felt promised but will probably never arrive – that became the inspiration.”

For some designers, that kind of conceptual provocation can feel like a cerebral obstacle course. Here, it permeated everything. At times literal – spectral prints scrawled across tees – and at others more insidious, particularly in their exploration of shapewear, one of the season’s most compelling through-lines. “Shapewear is neither garment nor body. It exists somewhere in between,” Madsen says. “And that in-between space feels very ghostly.” She pauses. “It’s also made from plastic, but after a few hours it takes on the smell of flesh. It becomes artificial and bodily at the same time. That tension makes it interesting.”

Shapewear appeared as foundation, underpinning dresses and acting as the base layer for the label’s signature drapery, but also as structure, forming exoskeletal tops that encased the models’ torsos. The show notes described it as a play between “compression and volume, containment and expansion” – a push-pull that defined the collection’s silhouette.

Elsewhere, the supernatural surfaced through blankets reimagined as garments. “When you dress as a ghost, you wear a blanket,” Clante notes. Translated into skirts, dresses and duffel coats, the motif became a surprisingly elevated outerwear proposition. Roses – painstakingly applied throughout – nodded to Scandinavian folklore and the symbolism of vanitas painting, where beauty and decay coexist in uneasy harmony.

Despite partnering with UGG on four bespoke styles – reworking the Quill Ballet Trainer, GoldenGlow Embossed Sandal, Otzo Clog and Minimel Trainer through the collection’s lens – it was the brand’s classic boots that received the SOLAS treatment for AW26. The Malmö-based airbrush artist collaborated closely with the designers, developing custom pattern work that extended beyond footwear. Those same ghostly forms resurfaced on one of the hero dresses: exaggerated shoulder pads, layered drapes, a silhouette that felt almost possessed.

Anne Sofie Madsen might not be afraid of ghosts. The only spirits we’re interested in, though, are the ones slipping out of her wardrobe.

Words – Sofia Ferreira