For our final destination we had to leave central Copenhagen behind for Kastrup – home to the massive, aquarium-like new airport which is located near fashion designer Anne Sofie Madsen’s studio, itself housed in a building that was once the King’s hunting residence. The mix of the historical and hyper-modern continues within Madsen’s studio: her sci-fi, robot and horror-inspired designs are couture created with the combination of time-consuming craftsmanship and an overload of images and references typical of the internet age. “I find films, exhibitions, plays, artists and illustrations that I collect in one big pile making my universe develop. Most of people I work with aren’t in the studio and just work with a computer so we communicate over Dropbox all the time.”
Yet her studio was still quite packed with assistants who were busy working on different tasks: cutting out and glueing together paper shapes, sketching manga cartoons from the internet or stitching bits of leather and plastic samples together. As Madsen picked up one of these samples, she said: “It’s really interesting that modern technology helps to save traditional handicraft techniques. If you want to know how to do something you can find a YouTube video of an old lady who knows a special crochet technique and you can teach yourself online. I have found that quite useful in many projects.” It’s this combination of traditional and modern that helps Madsen recreate her own universe for each collection.
Read more about Anne Sofie Madsen and Sleek and mb! Magazine’s road trip in the summer issue of Sleek, publishing soon.