William Fan

Marke

Once again, one of Berlin’s strongest offerings was Mario Keine’s Marke. Here is a designer who meticulously knows what he wants to create and sticks to it. It’s almost as if one collection introduces the next, with carry-over details like pearls across the body or buttons reappearing on the sharpest cut jackets on Berlin’s runways. Jumping from epoch to epoch with his references, Marke S/S 2027 felt more relaxed, as if Keine is feeling more comfortable and self-assured: Culottes, but made out of grey jersey, or crisp white Victorian-era formal jackets paired with balloon pants in the same jersey grounded by hefty black loafers. Our favorite look was an all-over striped combo in purple paired with an oxblood bomber jacket.

Barragán

Mexico City born designer Victor Barragán skipped S/S 2027 and already presented S/S 2030, the time of the projected end of Trump’s presidency and he chose Berlin’s Mexican embassy as the show’s backdrop. Barragán has been around for a decade by now, keeping a lower profile since he stopped showing at NYFW, most likely not because he chose to, but because he continues to be a true disruptor. Some mainstream German magazines have skipped covering his Berlin show entirely, probably for that reason. His clothing is not something you find lined up neatly on a rack in some downtown boutique. His collections are stances on immigration, race, queerness and are always highly charged, but executed in an earnest way. The casting was on point, the soundtrack was great, the fashion was lacking: Most ideas were translated from past US runways for his show in Europe: Dollar bill prints were turned into Euro prints, his always-there provocative slogan tees were back in full force or actually just recycled from a past show and ripped apart, or made dirty. This fashion show was definitely more show than fashion, but this is a brand more focused on social commentary than pushing product anyway.

ioannes

Johannes Boehl-Cronau is staying in Berlin. After his most recent and simultaneously final show in January, people were speculating whether he would start showing in Paris. Something that couldn’t be more untrue as the designer is critical of the state of fashion and more precisely how designers are being put in a box when it comes to presenting said fashion. So, he hosted a soirée inside his own Berlin apartment close to Alexanderplatz, which also functions as his studio in the only way we would expect from the designer: executed with utmost detail. Following up on his modus operandi of focusing on what is already there in the ioannes-verse, instead of frantically searching for new ideas, we caught a glimpse of a very distilled collection highlighting brand classics. Bias-cut and body-hugging silhouettes, unmistakable floral prints and no-nonsense classics like shirts and pants in black.

Milk of Lime

With their collection titled Ashes, the Belgo-German duo Julia Ballardt and Nico Verhaegen added another layer to their always a bit somber canon of thoughtful and poetic fashion collections. Playing with the topic of rebirth and burning something down to start anew seemed to be the leitmotif here. Belts holding matches, skirts in the colors of the tips of matches that light up, or ashy grey and black gauze fabric was used for an impromptu bustier layered over a crinkled white flowy shirt and skirt combo. The Antwerp spirit was really breezing through an old lecture hall ruin on Berlin’s Charité campus. The Milk of Lime S/S 2027 collection conjured up somewhere in rural South-West Germany by Ballardt and Verhaegen, who originally met in Antwerp during their master’s studies at the Royal Academy made sure, once again, the Germans get their necessary dose of serious (Belgian) capital-F fashion.

Kasia Kucharska

For S/S 2027, Kucharska also decided against a runway and chose to present her collection via an upbeat live installation. In cooperation with the Berlin architecture and design duo Gonzalez Haase who took care of the set, the designer put her latex explorations back into focus. We saw Kucharska push her technique as far as making her latex squiggles resemble all-over denim looks like the pair of mini shorts worn with a jean jacket, or even a trench coat completely made from latex giving the garments their unique bounce when in motion.

SF1OG

After watching Luca Guadagnino’s horror movie Suspiria, SF1OG designer Rosa Marga Dahl got to work conceiving a collection that is supposed to examine the duality of good and bad, reflecting the idea that evil often hides itself in constructs of power, in institutions or established systems. As in SF1OG’s last collection, we saw religious dress referenced, probably pointing to the hidden evil in some institutions. Power was asserted via a couple of stiff trench coat looks but beautifully juxtaposed with soft materiality in pants or sheer tops and dresses either in organza, silk or satin. Co-founders Dahl and Langemeyer continue building up their brand and we can genuinely enjoy watching them do so, cementing their brand signifiers further like the transparent horizontal lines on tops or some newly added small details, like cuts near the hems of pants, forgoing any graphic logos as is often the case with younger brands trying to build a name, which, judging by the heavy attendance, SF1OG is doing very well.

Dagger

The first show of Intervention on BFW’s last day, the format curated and launched by Reference Studios founder Mumi Haiati, which returned for its sixth edition this year at Kronprinzenpalais, was Dagger, a brand created out of frustration after being laid off from a job. If that isn’t the epitome of the fashion dream. Luke Raine is still using that run-of-the-mill email sign-off from the executive who fired him as a print on hoodies and shirts: We wish you all the best still lights a fire under Raine’s behind. This designer isn’t reinventing the wheel of fashion when it comes to developing cuts or following any major fashion city trends. What he does best is channel a generation’s desire for genuine communal clothing, easier access when it comes to pricing, and just wearable, good-looking, straight-up cool pieces. It matched perfectly with Intervention’s aim of bringing together the worlds of (high) fashion and subcultures and, if we may add, breathing a bit of life into Berlin Fashion Week. Drawing heavily from skate culture—because that is, quite simply, Raine’s culture—a Dagger show has you creating a shopping list in your head before it’s even over.

GmbH

Closing Berlin Fashion Week, as has become their thing by now, the duo that is Benjamin A. Huseby & Serhat Isik didn’t only look into their archive from the last decade, but Berlin’s fashion at large over the last one hundred years. And finally someone actually did, as there is a lavish history of couture-like houses that operated in Berlin in the 1920s up until the Nazi regime came to power heavily influencing Berlin’s, and Germany’s, relationship to fashion forever. What we saw was a great mix of GmbH typical skin-baring sports wear as in the barely-there tanks, the thigh-high leather stompers in black with silver zippers or the boxer-shorts in an array of fabrics and colors. Where it got interesting were the couture-esque theatrics like the collar on a coat which was a direct reference to German couturière Clara Böhm’s creations between 1912-1939. Embroidered A-line gowns, Loden jackets, a cool Ugg collab, a muscle flexed with the casting having Arca and Julez Smith walk a Berlin show: We feel as though GmbH is set up for their next ten years, even making it their new mission to reestablish fashion as serious cultural expression in Germany. If not them, who else, they got the perfect name for it.