A Runway Show With a Mission to Revive Berlin Fashion

You would be forgiven for assuming that, before GmbH, there was little Berlin-based fashion in existence. Sure, there were cult technical labels like Sabotage in the ‘90s or Claudia Skoda’s under-appreciated ‘70s knitwear experiments, but nobody who really broke out of the city’s underground scene. There were no Berlin brands who made waves and found critical acclaim in Paris until Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Işık met by chance within Berlin’s famed clubbing community and founded GmbH as a line of provocative, luxurious, predominantly black raver garb in 2016 — right? Thankfully, at the GmbH ten-year anniversary show this past week, the founders sought to set the record straight with a show about their own esteemed history and Berlin’s forgotten 20th century fashion.

“We wanted to look back at the largely untold history of Berlin fashion, which is to most people quite unknown, and find our place in the history of Berlin,” Huseby tells me in the courtyard of the stately Kronprinzenpalais, a former Royal Prussian residence where just moments before 38 models — including avant electronic music pioneer Arca and Daniel Julez J. Smith, son of Solange and a previous Highsnobiety cover boy — had presented GmbH’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection. 

Huseby and Işık researched the couturiers who defined Berlin’s bustling early 20th century fashion scene, such as Joe Strassner, a costume designer on British sci-fi film Transatlantic Tunnel (1935) alongside Elsa Schiaparelli, and Uli Richter, one of Germany’s most famed dressmakers whose celebrity clientele included Grace Kelly. Many of the looks referenced prints or colors or shapes created by Berlin designers of yesteryear. 

One of the challenges of assembling this de facto retrospective was how difficult it was to find source material. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime dealt a fateful blow to the German city’s fashion industry by destroying the archives of Jewish designers and essentially reducing the industry to a few state collaborators. After World War II, few designers returned to the city; Berlin’s fashion scene is still recovering to this day.

“When we started the brand, it was absolutely necessary for us to go to Paris and show our work on the center stage of fashion… Berlin was not ready at the time so we had to go there,” says Işık. (SS27 is the brand’s fifth season showing in Berlin rather than Paris.) “I don't think any of us would have been here 10 years ago. Being here today and being able to tell the story is quite serendipitous. It feels as though it's the right time to do it and to be here.”

As well as weaving in tropes from bygone designers, like the collar from a 1934 coat by Clara Böhm, the duo looked at their own decade-old archives, reworking former favorites and building on their codes. Alongside the couture references, Işık is quick to point to SS27’s “sexy sportswear,” a GmbH specialty that is embodied in tank tops so slight that they cover hardly any of the wearer’s torso, as well as the sharply exaggerated tailoring, as seen in one broad-shouldered black overcoat with a tightly nipped waist — styled without pants but with thigh-high shiny black leather boots. This is all classic GmbH: sporty, kinky, and with an overtly political story. 

The show, and its moment within Berlin Fashion Week,  signals a new era for the brand, where it has a new mission outlined in the show notes: “To make fashion accepted as a serious cultural expression in Germany.”

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