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The morning after their Autumn Winter 2026 show in Copenhagen, Anne Sofie Madsen and Caroline Clante look as though they have not quite come down from it. Sleep has been scarce. After the show they went out with the team — a few beers, a late night.

We meet in the offices of their PR agency. (In the same room, the Paolina Russo team is finalising designs for their own show tomorrow.) Three chairs are pulled into a loose triangle. They sit opposite me, side by side, their knees nearly touching. The closeness reads as habit rather than display. Although this is their third collection under shared credit (Anne Sofie’s earlier collections were developed solo), they were friends long before that.

They do not finish one another’s sentences. If anything, they resist convergence. Each holds her own phrasing. When one speaks, the other waits — sometimes to clarify, sometimes to object, occasionally to redirect the point entirely. The effect feels more adjacent than seamless. They do not seem in a hurry to resolve a thought. On several occasions, a question results in a discussion conducted largely between them. They turn slightly toward each other. I listen.

Caroline grew up in Copenhagen, in the apartment she still lives in today. As a young child, she wanted to be a boy called Karl and spent roughly a year insisting on the name. At kindergarten costume events, she dressed as knights and pirates. For years she imagined herself becoming a painter. Fashion arrived later and initially felt like a misstep. She briefly attended a fashion design school as a teenager but found the structure incompatible with how she thought. Deadlines, rules and formalised processes felt restrictive rather than generative.

There were two times she dropped out of high school, then modelled at 18, then assisted, did casting and creative production. Her professional path assembled itself incrementally. There was no credential to fall back on. If something went wrong, there was no hiding from it.

Anne Sofie’s childhood unfolded in a different setting. She grew up on Fyn, a rural Danish island, in what she describes as a narrow outlook. She remembers finding it difficult to be a girl, though she frames this less as rebellion than as misalignment. She gravitated toward comics, animation and drawing and imagined herself making cartoons or films rather than clothing.

When she entered fashion education she encountered a contradiction: the classrooms were filled with women, yet femininity itself was treated with caution. Pale colour, ornament, embroidery and softness were coded as decorative. Authority was associated with black tailoring.

Rather than stepping away from that tension, she leaned into it. In her sketchbooks every model became a princess, each with a crown perched on her head. She laughs when she mentions it. ‘I never spoke to Cecilie about that, I wonder whether she had the same feeling,’ she says, referring to Cecilie Bahnsen, who studied alongside her at the Royal Danish Academy.

Years later that instinct sits beside Caroline’s way of describing gender. She does not speak about masculinity or femininity in terms of silhouettes. She speaks about sensation. Today, she says, she feels most like a woman — she loves being one. Clothes usually described as masculine often make her feel the most herself, and therefore the most feminine. Dresses do not automatically produce that feeling.

Age enters the conversation indirectly. Anne Sofie says she has noticed how easily young men imagine themselves becoming older men, while young women rarely picture themselves older at all, as though womanhood is composed of separate chapters rather than a continuous line. At this point they bring up a friend. They explain that this person does not perform gender in any recognisable way and does not seem to perform age either. Nothing in their appearance signals youth or maturity, masculinity or femininity. What stands out is not deliberate androgyny but the absence of performance altogether. There is no visible effort to declare identity. They return to this friend more than once. It feels close to what they are after in their collections: a presence that does not need to resolve itself for anyone else.

It is around here that Anne Sofie brings up a question they are asked constantly and increasingly resent: who their clothes are for. For them, the idea of a defined ‘woman’ has never been the starting point. They do not imagine a character or demographic. Instead, they think in situations: what someone might want to wear to a meeting, to a party, on a long night, the morning after or on an ordinary day when nothing is meant to happen. The Anne Sofie Madsen person remains deliberately unspecific. For them, this is less a political stance than a practical one.

Their collections move in several directions at once. An extravagant evening dress can sit beside ordinary jeans. Something delicate appears next to something blunt. They admire older collections that held that kind of range without clarifying it.

That expansiveness carries into the way they work. Anne Sofie says they rely less on visual research than people assume. The starting point is usually conversation. Films. Books. A sentence remembered out of context. While Caroline speaks, Anne Sofie draws.

Much of what they share culturally comes from before Caroline was born: late 1970s New York, early 1980s London, punk, underground cinema and old school science fiction. Caroline speaks about photographers who documented nightlife — people on their way out, or on their way home, caught between one version of themselves and another. She is drawn to that moment of slight transformation, when identity loosens. They hesitate to call it nostalgia. Anne Sofie says she is ambivalent about the word.

When asked what they appreciate about one another, Anne Sofie describes Caroline as gentle, deeply curious and serious about culture. She uses the Danish word dannet — a term she struggles to translate, somewhere between cultivated and culturally formed. She also calls her extremely stubborn. They laugh. It creates arguments, she says, but also a necessary friction.

Caroline responds by describing Anne Sofie’s steadiness — someone who has always been recognisably herself, and who carries a visible inner child: playful, curious, occasionally chaotic. At the same time, she notes with how much passion Anne Sofie takes the work and how she encourages her to remain open rather than retreat into caution. Caroline says she has always felt old inside. Anne Sofie’s energy, she suggests, offsets that weight.

As the conversation turns to how they function in practice, Anne Sofie says something that initially sounds inverted. Despite having followed the more conventional educational path, she describes Caroline as the more structurally reliable of the two. Caroline, she says, is the one who does not fuck up.

Caroline does not contest this. She explains that she never had an institution to lean on, no structure that could absorb a mistake. From early on, everything depended on her own precision. If something went wrong, it was hers to repair. Anne Sofie admits she is often the one inclined to stretch the sensible route, to see how far it can go. Caroline makes sure it holds. Toward the end, they drift back into conversation with each other, refining a point that no longer concerns me.

I ask whether this is how they build a collection.

Caroline looks at Anne Sofie.

Anne Sofie laughs. ‘Yes,’ she says. After a pause: ‘More or less.’