Berlin Fashion Week F/W 2025

“Berlin has always been a place where people don’t give a fuck, basically,” he reflected, which is something the founders of GmbH had also said to Art Basel last year, expounding on what made one a true Berliner. Amesh assumes it’s the art and culture atmosphere of Berlin, which makes it very collaborative and DIY for young designers, who are very hands-on with their designs using graffiti, brushstrokes, and working with their friends to put up a show. Makes it a little more affordable and doable, he concluded—Berlin's dark aesthetic was not a place for Amesh’s sunset-hued shirts, but he admits there is the German fashion council and Reference making sure there are incubators for the emerging ones to thrive. Berlin is also becoming increasingly political, he said, which reminded me of GmbH’s limited-edition zine – now sold out – where they said, “My father said to me, ‘Your work is my revenge.”

Here is a roundup of ten designers we loved in Berlin this fashion week. 

Benjamin and Serhat know what makes menswear sensual. Working with such classic garments has been their practice since their very beginnings—adding the front lines from men’s underwear to a jean and making them into zippers is the clever tongue-in-cheek humour one has come to expect from GmbH. Shifting one element from its designated place to another, the duo breaks down the formalism of menswear to something more vulnerable and emotional, like a soft piece of pink fabric tying the arms of a suit together, coming down to the waist, encircling it as a belt for FW23. If that does not exude sex, I don’t know what does.

It is a certain kind of queerness imbued in the very fabric of what they see as menswear—be it through a shiny shirt styled with corduroy pants or transforming the back of a white shirt into a twin corset or in this collection, through the softness and transparency of silk organza kaftans and veils, which pierce through the stoicism of menswear. Or the playfulness of starting a coat from below the shoulder, seen more often as a styling choice in womenswear. Living in Germany as queer children of Muslim immigrants, as they wrote in their show notes for SS25, the designers asked last season, “In the face of adversity, resistance is a survival strategy,” they write, “What is resistance?” Resistance doesn’t always lie within words on clothes, and GmbH knows they aren’t doing that, but perhaps we needed to hear ‘Refuse to trade with the enemy’ in Serhat’s father’s voice, who had initially said it, to know someone will keep the bell tolling when everyone is silent. 

Kusi Kubi makes menswear sexy. Particularly through the inclusion of gold and strategic placements of cutouts that lay bare the male body clad in a gold corset or a crop top made from rings of gold, ending above his chest. As someone who first entered the industry through styling, it is particularly prominent in highlighting the gender fluidity of his menswear, where he styles an interlinked gold chain skirt over leather trousers—the London-based designer is clearly taking from queer subcultures as well in the way he fashions masculinity.

Kubi was designing trousers under trousers long before it became a trend, and to argue a case about how campy the designer can be, one need look no further than his third season collection, where he printed looks from his previous collection on his T-shirts—one of the most obviously self-referential things ever. This humour permeated through his collection this season too as he worked with tie-dyeing leather—a material he works with often as a designer whose work is rooted in upcycling materials, which most designers often do in Ghana, where he’s from and divides his time—particularly through blue-dyed leather, imitating denim. Kubi loves colours and has a playful approach to cutting shapes and silhouettes, as seen in his SS23, and although this collection works with traditional pieces, it’s the funkiness of a leather vest or panties that makes it quintessentially Kubi—add to that slouchy leather boots that have the base of a vintage house slipper.

Lou de Bètoly’s earliest collections are almost designed like the visual equivalent of entering a curiosity shop with a sheer onslaught of maximalism of knitwear on patterns on weaves on beads. It is indeed a wondrous thing that is Lou’s imagination, to look at glass frames and eye lenses and think a garment can be reconstructed from them, without any change in their original form. Classic designs like a gladiator sandal were transformed into a multicoloured assemblage of wool laces. While this style has stuck with her throughout the years, she’s using the upcycled aspect of her practice for a more minimal design language. 

Layering of clashing patterns like tweed on checkered fabric is done well as Lou knows exactly the right amount of each she should use. The privacy of vintage undergarments is transformed into a near-formal pencil skirt. Crisp bed sheets are reworked into a soft, fur-like texture and dyed in the babiest of pinks. Assemblages of nylon yarn, wool, and crystals form a very small segment of her collection, as such amalgamated exercises have now been channelled towards crocheting vintage belts into a top or reconstructing cut-up leather jackets. Perhaps one of the most delightful elements in this collection is her crocheting broken bike reflectors, hand-collected from the streets of Berlin, into full-fledged garments, burning bright on the runway.

Marlon Ferry’s bags are creatures with a life of their own—and may or may not be larger than you with their slithering tentacles. Ferry is obsessed with the biological and taking the body beyond its humanity to an extraterrestrial realm, and his signature is his 3D-printed sculptures that almost give a parasitical Venom embracing the body but make it sculpted. The emerging designer had his first showcase in Berlin last year, working with simple silhouettes of body-hugging gowns, with his sculptures and Hellraiser-like headgear. 

This collection delved deeper into the universe of phantasmagoria that is Ferry, through heavy gowns of vegan snakeskin leather with glossy spider eyes, awaiting to emerge, or Carrie-like trickles of blood cascading down the throat to a red dress, or liquid latex meant to emulate torn skin, also giving Victorian boy at night; one must conclude that worldbuilding is clearly Ferry’s oeuvre.

Looking at Kasia’s scribbled black lace shorts, giving nude illusion is like starting at a fragment from everyone’s childhood when our hands were forever etched with amateur workings of pen. The pure whimsicality of scribbling upon one’s body is what Kasia began with as a mechanical design student working with latex lace; however, beyond her MA graduate showcase, this design language has transformed into concrete patterns of florals concentrated on flip-flops or embellishing a handbag—or as gothic designs on a latex blouse, last year. That the designer has worked with Balenciaga previously is subtly evident in her usage of face masks and figure-hugging bodycon suits. 

As a designer who resorts to bright Y2K colours, Kasia’s current collection is steeped in bubble-gum pinks, bright blues, and fluorescent greens. During her early years as a designer, she’d frequently work with rouging a long shirt to make it into a dress—the same principles of which were used here in an interplay of tightening and loosening the silhouette. Deconstruction has stayed strong throughout her design language, here in threads trailing from skirt panels or lowering the skirt hemline into a dangerous V or reconstructing an oversized tube dress with strips of denim, knitted piece and of course, her signature scribbles.

That Johann Ehrhardt loves classic cuts was evident from his very first releases in 2021, when he harped upon the traditional silhouette of a bomber or a boat neck jacket—however disorienting the structure of it all through thick, uneven brushstrokes along the lines, immediately transforming them into youthful streetwear. He exaggerates the silhouette to play with its length and width as he pleases—a trouser in his SS24 collection collects at the bottom of the leg, almost transforming into a lookalike shoe itself, while a special design for Berlin’s Eurovision representative Tenya had a distressed red cropped jacket’s sleeves extend till it became a fingerless glove. 

In many ways, Ehrhardt exudes the goth glam energy of Berlin—it is quite inconspicuous, like he, among many emerging and established designers in the city, primarily works with black—but perhaps more so in this collection, which seems like it wouldn’t be a misfit in Nosferatu’s closet, with full-coverage, non-gendered, elongated silhouettes, wherein also lies the designer’s fluidity. He serves us a story of arrival from a train journey and seemingly travels across time with modern-day bomber jackets and boots to a more nineteenth-century woman in the trail with her jacket and hat. Accessories have always been Ehrhardt’s forte, recycling compasses to make suit buttons, adding thick grungy nails to dresses, or making bracelets like futuristic handcuffs in previous collections—this season the designer bag seems to move towards a travel-friendly black case, with hints of silver, assured to be a classic. 

There is something inherently deconstructed about Sia, which infiltrates even her most tailored collections—the lined skirt fabric trailing behind like fabric rolls or dull grey athleisure with cutouts at the knee and oversized cuffs added to the sweatshirt. It is difficult to pin down the Sia Arnika woman—it’s a multitude, much like the material she works with, layering mesh on yarn on leather. One thing is certain: she is very goth, obvious in her wedges with transparent straps—long before Chloe inaugurated the arrival of boho chic last year. Growing up tearing apart her mother’s beloved shirts, it’s not uncanny to see slashing fabrics and cut patterns become a signature and also take shape through moth-eaten flimsy fabric. 

Sia cuts away pieces from garments where it's most sensual—like the back of a faux fur sweater or turning a puffy crop top into a bralette with puffer sleeves in earlier collections. This element of surprise is still there in her current collection, where t-shirts transform into swimsuits, chequered shirts are morphed into sleeveless tops or dresses with puffed up skirts and – pockets! Sia drapes deliciously and accessories – including footwear, is another area Sia thrives in, with metallic drip earrings, ending in a sharp point right above the neck. They collaborated with Phillip Kern to transform the classic Danish workwear clog into one with a curved heel. 

The first time I had seen Maximilian Gedra, I’d thought this gives Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, form-fitting sparkly goth-coded dresses that play with silhouettes and the very form of the body. Gedra is very Berlin and very performative in his rebellious spray-painted oversized jackets and spiked-out ‘80s shiny leathery shoulder pad moments ending in a similar shape at the sleeve—sometimes they’re even deliciously covered in fur, giving ‘is it a bird, is it a plane’ moment. McQueen is a clear inspiration, seeing how he uses paint dabs and eye masks in his previous collection, and Gedra almost seems to scatter moth-like forms across his collection, with wing-like shapes in one garment or the antennae masks in another. 

Gedra officially enters the office this collection, transforming his campy into a more officious version. Divided shoulder pads are conjoined into one singular jacket in an illusion of a structured hunch. Punk rebellion arrives in other forms, like a jacket made completely of dishevelled ties or a dress made completely of hair. The designer plays with concealing and revealing the body in turtleneck jackets that cover the mouth but are cropped at the waist. It’s an office meeting in the evening and rave at the Addams’ basement at night. Unsurprisingly, Gaga has now embraced Gedra, wearing his spiked hat for Abracadabra. 

There has always been something very self-assuredly romantic about Rosa Marga Dahl and Jacob Langemeyer’s brand—it could be the thin red ribbons along the cuff of an oversized black overcoat from FW22, or the thigh-high boots styled with shorts and an unbuttoned shirt almost simulating a modern Mr. Darcy in FW23—albeit very gay. The SF1OG girl will also fight you and emerge with bruised lips and bandaged fingers, as seen in multiple collections. Of course, a girl like her owns a purse with a key to a gothic mansion dangling from it. This romanticism is very much from the past, which Dahl and Langemeyer frequently look back to, particularly with the materials they use—satin bed sheets, newsprint from an article on Bob Dylan, or even the malleability of headgear and gloves transformed into hard pottery.

This season, this romanticism has simmered down to certain elements of shirts with long sleeves and large cuffs, fur collars imitating the early modern theatrical collars, and most particularly, the energy of a rock show in the ‘80s in ripped jeans and form-fitting pants. Styling is evidently the brand’s strong suit, along with pairing immaculate tailoring with the deconstructed. SF1OG loves dirt and grime, seen earlier in dirt-caked shoes and stained jackets, which has now taken the shape of the ugly striped cardigan and beanie of the boy-next-door from the noughties. Obviously with this pairing, the Converse cannot be too far behind, and they’ve interestingly styled those shoes with metal studs, showing obvious signs of wear and tear.