Here's What We Saw At Amsterdam Fashion Week 2025
Amsterdam Fashion Week 2025 closed last week with more international weight than ever. Press, buyers, and designers flew in from across Europe, while a new partnership with Copenhagen Fashion Week set the tone for a season focused on collaboration and sustainability.
Instead of sticking to rigid show formats, designers leaned into unusual settings and unexpected gestures. Knitwear project B.B. Wallace launched on a rainy farm morning, where guests ate breakfast, learned to make cheese, and tried on knits built to last. It was as much about slowing down as it was about fashion.
MARTAN brought things back into the city, taking over NACO Huisje, a restored 1919 ferry office on the IJ. The Amsterdam-based label, founded by Eugénie, Diek and Douwe, has built its identity around transforming discarded luxury hotel linens into something new. We had a chance to catch up with the latter o the trio at their waterside event. “Everything you see is made of either table cloth or bed linen from a luxury hotel,” they said. “We can work around it, tie it in beautiful colors, make prints on it, and create actually everything we like from a blank canvas.”
That canvas is never truly blank—it’s marked by a nautical spirit that runs through every collection. Both designers grew up near the water, surrounded by boats and reeds. “Every collection builds a bit,” said Diek. This season, that meant knotted rope dresses reimagined as more abstract, sculptural forms. “We started to create a more abstract version of knots twirling around the body, all sewn by hand for days in versions of tops, skirts, and a full dress,” Douwe explained. The result felt tactile and deeply personal, a reminder that sustainable fashion doesn’t have to read as minimalist or beige.
“People think of sustainable fashion and they imagine something boring,” Diek said. “We really wanted to show that it can be spectacular.” Douwe added, “It’s quite funny that you say bold, because we toned down already.” Their “toned down” palette leaned on soft greens, half-tones, and muted greys, all carefully balanced with earlier collections so pieces could be mixed and matched across seasons.
The collaboration with Het Scheepvaartmuseum made the setting even more resonant. NACO Huisje, once a ferry ticket office, was reimagined as MARTAN’s maritime world, complete with mannequins lounging on dining tables and archive pieces staged alongside the new collection. It was part exhibition, part performance, and part retail experiment—a way of making their world tangible to anyone who stepped inside.
But what makes MARTAN stand out is the way Diek and Douwe aren’t afraid to take risks, even when it goes against the playbook of how a fashion brand is supposed to behave. During AFW, they cooked an entire press dinner themselves, serving raw fish to a table of journalists. It was an unconventional move, but it echoed their approach to design: personal, hands-on, and unafraid of vulnerability.
Camiel Fortgens took a different approach, staging his show in a public park. Models drifted through the space alongside families, strollers, dogs, and bikes. “We just did the show in the park in Amsterdam,” he said. “We wanted to have a continuation of that chill vibe, a real park setting feeling, and get away a little bit from the fixed format show.”
For Fortgens, the choice blurred the line between presentation and everyday life. “I wanted to have the feeling that they were just walking in the park. So that’s a dog, a bike, phone, I don’t know, all those things.” The show was also a homecoming. “I grew up here, and in the beginning this was where I saw fashion. I started on Amsterdam Fashion Week with my first show as well, so it’s special to be back.”
Asked about trends, he kept it direct: “Don’t follow the trends, and wear your own clothes and feel happy and relaxed.”
YUME YUME made its AFW debut by transforming the garden of the Willet-Holthuysen Museum into a surreal bloom. Known for sculptural footwear, the brand stretched its universe into ready-to-wear, eyewear, and accessories with Flora Fantasi, a collection inspired by the praying mantis as a symbol of transformation. Petal-like skirts, oversized gloves, floral headpieces, and sharp-meets-soft tailoring turned the show into an otherworldly gardening club, where models clipped flowers as bird calls swelled around them.
Footwear remained the root of the story but grew in strange, poetic directions: sandals on heart-shaped heels, Roomy Boots lined with sheep wool and perched on stilettos, and floral takes on their cult Ball Boot. Pops of dusty pink, slime green, petal-shaped hats and even a baby bump made the runway feel alive, a collection oscillating between structure and softness. It was odd, lush, and full of promise, showing YUME YUME is ready to grow far beyond shoes.
Patience, too, made its AFW debut inside Amsterdam’s 17th-century Molen van West, turning the windmill into a two-day meditation on time and process. Founded by Borre Akkersdijk, Menno Drontmann, and Esmée van den Boom, the project unfolded through sound by Ojas, music from Lateef, and scents by Barnabé Fillion, stitched together with the collective’s first product reveals. By foregrounding slowness, unfinished ideas, and collaboration, Patience positioned itself less as a brand launch than as an ongoing practice.
From farms to ferry houses to elegant gardens and public parks, AFW 2025 showed that Amsterdam’s strength lies in its willingness to experiment. The city’s fashion week doesn’t try to mimic the major capitals — it thrives by leaning into its own ecosystem, where collaboration, risk-taking, and a laid-back sense of play set the tone.
