Passion and Politics: The Best of Berlin Fashion Week

There are many reasons why Berlin Fashion Week feels exciting. It’s in the pastiched leathery latex uniform of the city’s young ravers, its strong focus on sustainability, craft and inclusion, and its mindboggling financial funding from the state (a cool €4 million, by the way). It all means designers who sometimes are barely scraping 3,000 Instagram followers are presenting their shows in grand listed buildings, with full-fledged runway productions that feel more like immersive art installations, shown to gaggles of excitable art school students in sunglasses and second-hand furs who are just as excited for the inevitable afterparty later on. 

There’s no shortage of talent in the lineup, either. Now in its third edition, Reference Studios’ Intervention platform showcased a day of radical designers, from the politically charged tailoring of GmbH to the conceptual constructions of Lueder, the sci-fi sensuality of Kasia Kucharska, and the nostalgic playfulness of Andrej Gronau. The curation, led by Berliner Mumi Haiati – the founder of the communications agency – felt razor-sharp and distinctly Berlin in its approach. “The Berlin fashion scene is becoming more visible, for sure. The landscape is particularly creative,” he says. “The response has been incredibly positive and highly emotional.”

Below, we list seven of the best shows from February’s Berlin Fashion Week 2024. 

GmbH

Probably the jewel in the crown of this season’s Berlin Fashion Week, Benjamin Huseby and Serhat Işık’s brand GmbH hosted an intimate show with Reference Studio’s platform Intervention for the second season in a row. Its intimacy made sense: “The starting point for this particular collection was trying to find when we felt the most centred,” Huseby told us. “When we felt like our truest selves without being distracted by the anxieties of the outside world.” They looked to the suits worn by their fathers, revisited their previous tailoring codes, and found comfort in craft without gimmicks. At a sombre interval during the show, Norwegian modernist poet Gunvor Hofmo’s voice beckoned from the speakers, reciting her work From Another Reality, which provided the name for the collection. Its message was to find empathy for lives in turmoil, encouraging a sense of community in connecting with others under the same grey clouds – the tears in the eyes of their audience felt like proof the message was heard loud and clear. 

Read our feature on the show here.

SF1OG

Another uber-cool brand with a growing global appeal, SF1OG hosted their show at the world’s most famous techno club, Berghain, which is a pretty big deal for a brand that’s only been showing for under three years. “I would say myself that [our pieces are] not sexy, but rather more romantic. It’s always based on a feeling,” the brand’s creative director Rosa Marga Dahl told us, “but this season, we’re allowing new things to come to the brand, like being hot.” In a thrust towards a different aesthetic, the German label revived the early 2010s Camden Town misfit style, where MySpace aesthetics collided with that thrift-shop sleaze. Pete Doherty, naturally, served as the blueprint. They also reintroduced some new styles of shutter shades. “I think older people might be a bit irritated by those,” said Jacob Langemeyer, who founded the brand with Marga Dahl. 

Read our feature on the show here.

Lou de Bètoly

Guests were hugging the walls in the historic Spiegelsaal at Clärchens Ballhaus surrounding a grand piano in a far-too-small room, before the first look from French designer Lou de Bètoly’s new collection made its descent from the corner stairway. That look grabbed you from the jump – like some perverse and sexy twist on the fashion codes of old money, a tweed skirt suit was ripped open and turned out, embellished with clusters of tiny party sequins that caught the dim light like broken glass. Later with the arrival of nightgowns, underwear, coats and accessories, it felt as if a set of Parisian haute couture clients had been seduced, wrecked, and reimagined by Berlin’s grubby underbelly. With pieces provided by eBay upcycled into a new form of rough and ready opulence, the collection made an unexpected standout on the schedule.

Sia Arnika

God bless the models at Sia Arnika’s show. Berlin-based TOR Studio transformed a chilly film studio into a sudsy, seaweed-ridden arena for the Danish-born designer to send her windswept beauties, who teetered on clogs elevated to towering hooked heels, out onto a fierce expedition around the room’s peripheries. Delicately titled Harbour Bitch, the collection was a love letter to the Danish-born designer’s childhood on the rugged island of Mors, filtered through her signature lens of provocative sensuality. Fishing nets became gossamer stockings, plaid workwear was twisted into rakish, skin-baring silhouettes, and industrial waterproofs clung to bodies like second skins. Since her last show, international hot girl Charli XCX has become a dedicated disciple of the brand – so perhaps, at long last, we have a vision of what a ‘Brat winter’ truly looks like.

Marke

German designer Mario Keine is certainly a romantic. He’s spent the last few months with his nose in books researching, and he’s returned with a few muses in Miss Havisham and Stephen Tennant. Their ghosts lingered heavily over his A/W25 collection, Everything That Stays Is Love, a tribute to longing, loss, and the cruel beauty of time’s passage. Hosted at the intimate, historic Villa Elisabeth, the show unfolded in three ‘acts’: the first represented youth in fluid silhouettes and jewellery trapped under skin-tight mesh. Then came the descent into grief, a wardrobe for mourning in rich, sombre fabrics, then finally a crescendo of decay and excess, with some fabulous draped bows and raw-edged shirting. Keine is a one-man band in all of this fashion hullabaloo with an inspirational tenacity – his next move will be one worth watching, perhaps even longing for.

Richert Beil

If there ever was a gentle way to start a show, Richert Beil’s A/W25, Mutter, was determined to reject it. But that was kind of the point. Exploring the “depths of emotional and physical exhaustion”, guests sat listening to the skull-piercing cries of a baby, relentlessly echoing its anguish in an abandoned bunker in the middle of Kreuzberg, once a place to stay for mothers and their children during World War II. Founded by Jale Richert and Michele Beil in 2014, the brand is one of the more archetypically ‘Berlin’ on the schedule, but as its narrative took shape as models emerged – real mothers, twins, families – the collection unfolded in a dialogue between softness and restraint, between the weight of care and the sharp edges of exhaustion, and it became apparent the duo had crafted something profound and vulnerable. Despite its skin-tight, sensual and flesh-baring designs, this was a show that really got under your skin.

Andrej Gronau

A debut collection from Andrej Gronau rounded off Reference Studios’ day of Intervention by tying it up in a big, floppy, knitted bow. Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2022 – where his viral star cut-out knee-high boots first turned heads – the German designer has been on an upward trajectory, with Ssense quickly snapping up his nostalgic and playful creations. His A/W25 offering is a love letter to the bric-a-brac that turns a house into a home – the souvenirs perched on windowsills, fridge doors plastered with postcards from places we may never return to, and the comforting clutter of childhood relics too precious to toss. Despite its childlike nostalgia, there was something very new and current in its cosy knitted comfort, tailored for a generation phobic of the outside world, preferring to be strapped to an iPhone over partying until dawn. Shiny and starred outerwear had (very welcome) echoes of old Miu Miu, while tailoring had a smooth plasticky textile reminiscent of doll’s clothes. In Gronau’s dig through the past, he’s unearthed plenty of joy.