Exciting debuts, a growing international guest list and stronger commercial potential from the city’s strongest brands: the latest edition of Berlin Fashion Week (BFW) drew to a close on Monday as organiser Fashion Council Germany (FCG) continues to invest in the event with the hopes of competing on the global stage.
This season, there were a few brands missing from the schedule. Shayne Oliver’s Anonymous Club, who brought in a large audience from the international fashion community last season (Kanye West showed up), dropped out of the schedule. Namilia’s spectacle of a show was also sorely missed. Founders Nan Li and Emilia Pfohl decided to focus on the business and switch to showing once a year, instead launching a capsule collection with Playboy that was displayed at Der Berliner Salon (a public exhibition in Berlin’s Kulturforum, which is on until 23 February). Up-and-coming brand Kitschy Couture hosted a showroom-meets-community event to present the brand’s new capsule collection (primarily consisting of thongs and lingerie). The brand made a splash last season with a runway show hosted in a public swimming pool. Founder Abarna Kugathasan says the brand is getting ready to launch an online store.
Despite that, many collections seemed to have become more sophisticated, and the international guest list grew significantly (from 35 last season to around 50 this season). Fashion Council Germany CEO Scott Lipinski compares BFW’s growth to a positive cycle or a snowball that gets bigger as it gets faster. “The investment that we did as Fashion Council Germany over the last seasons, trying to internationalise and professionalise, has been worth it,” he says.
A tense political backdrop
BFW took place in the run-up to the German election, which is set for 23 February. On Friday, as attendees arrived in Berlin, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which is Germany’s mainstream conservative party, aligned with far-right party AfD in support of anti-immigration policies. (No party has ever aligned with AfD previously.) The perception that a mainstream party was in bed with the alt-right extremists had many locals feeling uneasy. “That hasn’t happened before, so there’s a lot of fear,” says Lipinski.
Attendees driving across the city to catch the fashion shows noticed the political posters plastered all over the capital — some of which had been torn or defaced with graffiti. On Sunday, protests against AfD held up guests on their way to the afternoon shows, and at the Colrs show on Saturday, one attendee held up a sign that read “Love fashion, f*ck AfD”. “The fashion community in Berlin is really strong, and we will keep showing what we love and what we do,” Pascal Christopher Marcy, who made the sign and works in fashion PR and marketing in Berlin, told me after the show.
Many designers referenced the political tensions in their collections. Richert Beil’s show opened with a soundtrack of a crying baby. “A mother with her newborn is kind of like the overall feeling we have these days politically,” explains co-founder and head of design Michele Beil. “You’re overwhelmed and tired, but at the same time, you have to take responsibility — you still have to work, you still have to perform, you always need to be present.” The show was hosted in an abandoned bunker, which was a safe space for mothers and their children during WWII.
GmbH took a different approach. “Our previous two collections have been very explicitly political, and I think this time we felt the same sense of dread in the world,” said co-founder Benjamin Huseby backstage. “Like the world is in mourning,” added co-founder Serhat Isik. This season, the founders looked inward. The collection revisited some of their favourite past GmbH looks in an attempt to find comfort in past ideas “from a time when the world might have seemed less threatening”, the press release read.
Arts and culture budgets have already been cut in Germany, and there are fears that more will follow after the election. But Lipinski is less concerned about the budget cuts impacting Berlin Fashion Week. “We’re funded by the State Senator of Economics — and that’s a sign that [BFW] is considered an investment in the city’s economy,” he says, referencing the new business that BFW has brought in, such as models being booked and new agencies setting up in the city.
Implementing sustainability requirements: A work in progress
In June, the FCG announced that it would be implementing sustainability criteria for designers showing in Berlin. The requirements will come into full effect in 2026, but this season marks the first of brands piloting the requirements, filling out a survey that the council monitors.
There are approximately 125 questions in the survey, comprising sustainability across strategy, design, material choices, working conditions, consumer engagement and the fashion shows themselves. Many of the questions are adapted from Copenhagen Fashion Week’s approach but with the addition of German-specific supply chain laws and an emphasis on Berlin Fashion Week’s core principles of inclusion and freedom.
SF1OG, for instance, only uses repurposed, deadstock or “responsible” new materials while striving to make more sustainable choices across production and events. Despite this, the brand found the sustainability requirements challenging. “As a small brand, the monitoring part is difficult for us, especially the CO2 tracking for instance. We’re so small that it doesn’t make sense to spend resources on [formal tracking]. We just try to be as responsible as we can,” says SF1OG co-founder and brand manager Jacob Langemeyer.
“Like anything new, adaptation takes time,” says FCG sustainability manager Catherine Hansmann. “One of the easiest sections in the survey was related to design. It was evident that designers have a deep understanding of their products, which is a strong starting point. After all, design is the foundation of everything.” The council is planning to host webinars and online tutorials that explain how to fill out the various questions in the survey.
Marke, which uses deadstock materials and prioritises local production, also engaged with the requirements. Founder Mario Keine says it took him over four hours to work through the survey. Nevertheless, he says the requirements are extremely important and have served as a useful North Star as his brand continues to grow. “There were so many points in the survey I had to Google because I didn’t know about it, so I made a note to look into it,” he says. “If there’s something I know about in the beginning, I can directly implement it in my structure.”
Berlin’s new guard is growing up
Berlin’s mainstay brands presented more sophisticated collections and are gaining commercial interest from buyers.
BFW favourite SF1OG’s collection demonstrated a departure from a design perspective. “We had quite a change in the silhouette, we went quite a bit slimmer, referencing indie sleaze, which was the first music culture we explored when we were 13 or 14. This is our first season doing eyewear, too. We reimagined the iconic shutter shades,” says Langemeyer. He notes that the brand has seen strong commercial interest: “We’re also more wholesale now, it’s picking up a lot in Asia and North America. One of the new stockists we have this season is Beams [in Tokyo], and next season, we have two more stores in Japan, one in Taiwan, two in South Korea and two new ones in the US.”
Buyers were particularly interested in Lueder’s combining of strong design codes with commercial potential. “Marie [Lueder] is the epitome of the new-gen star: she represents her very specific community, the clothes are young and cool, but it’s also very wearable and well priced,” says Stavros Karelis, founder of London concept store Machine-A, a stockist of the brand.
The Lou de Bètoly show was another highlight among buyers and press. The brand only shows once a year because of the hand-work required for the intricate upcycled garments. “I have a very intuitive way of working. I don’t start thinking about themes; I always start with materials, and then I build the story around that,” says founder and designer Odély Teboul (the brand name is an anagram). For instance, the bike reflectors that she made into a top took three years of collecting the pieces on her way to work. “Lou de Bètoly had this really beautiful couture-like take on clothes, but a lot of them were still quite wearable,” says Karelis. “She really embraced the female silhouette in such a cool way.”
Exciting debuts
This season, Reference Studios hosted the third edition of its Intervention platform, which showcases and mentors talent with strong international potential. Along with Lueder and GmbH, there were two exciting additions: Kasia Kucharska and Andrej Gronau.
Kasia Kucharska, who is known for her 3D-printed latex designs that emulate the look of lace, debuted this season after winning the FCG/Vogue Fashion Fund. “It feels good to start here in Berlin,” she said after the show. “It’s been a beautiful experience. I have to be honest, I was quite scared in the beginning because I felt I wasn’t ready, but the past few weeks I’ve really been enjoying the experience.” She is putting the funding from the award towards the show and collection and is also investing in her printing technology — which she is hoping to eventually patent. “It was so great to see the first show of the first-ever winner of Vogue Germany’s fund with Fashion Council Germany,” says Vogue Germany head of editorial content, Kerstin Weng. “Kasia brought an impressive collection to life.”
Central Saint Martins graduate Andrej Gronau’s designs play with notions of childlike wonder and nostalgia. The Autumn/Winter 2025 offering was a playful collection inspired by kitsch vintage collectables. “It feels amazing to debut — very stressful, but I’m so glad I did this,” Gronau said backstage. “Berlin has become a new space for emerging designers, and there’s a lot of support. It would be very hard to do runway shows of this scale in Paris, for example, because it’s very full there and there are so many amazing designers. I think you can work and show anywhere; it’s more about the people you connect with, and Berlin is like a home because I’m German myself.”
Palmwine Icecream’s debut also brought in a lot of eyes. The brand, which is based between London and Accra in Ghana, hosted its AW25 show in Berghain, presenting a collection of printed leather sets in burnt orange and forest green. “I think what we’ve seen is really promising, and with the right work, the brand can become even stronger,” says Karelis.
Celebrating Berlin’s cultural scene
On the final day of BFW, Fashion Council Germany chairwoman Christiane Arp (who served as editor of Vogue Germany for 17 years) opened up the 10th edition of Der Berliner Salon, which was an evolution of Arp’s Vogue Salon emerging talent platform. Many of the 55 designers in this edition of Der Berliner Salon are still studying. “As the people organising Berlin Fashion Week, we have to ask: What is the DNA of Berlin? What attracts people who visit all the fashion capitals? You want to discover something different, so we wanted to show you places you would have never visited during fashion week [like a museum],” Arp told me at Kulturforum after a private tour.
A number of brands also experimented with different artistic forms. GmbH’s show was in two acts, split with an intermission, where poetry from Norwegian modernist poet Gunvor Hofmo played to the crowd.
Palmwine Icecream and SF1OG both hosted shows in Berlin’s iconic Berghain nightclub. The brands worked together to convince the exclusive club to let them use the venue. “I tried to reach out to Berghain and get a contact, but we weren’t getting feedback — as you can imagine, it’s quite tricky,” says SF1OG’s Langemeyer. “Then, I heard a rumour someone else was having conversations with Berghain so I gave the CEO of the brand a call the next day and suggested that we do something together. We’re super happy about it; it was perfect.”
Sveasøn’s debut was a pleasant surprise for many. The presentation was a dance performance that ended with the dancers dressing massive sculptures made of wood and wire covered with liquid plastic. “Nobody thought the garments we were showing would fit on the huge sculptures, so we really wanted to show that they could. Most of the garments are reversible so it was cool to have the dancers remove the clothing and reverse it and just play with it and have fun with it,” says founder and designer Svea Beckedorf.
FCG’s Lipinski says there’s the potential for BFW to expand to include more of the city’s artistic and cultural formats. “The vision over the next seasons is to include other parts of the creative industries like music and art, where partnerships feel natural,” says Lipinski. “But we’ll still be considerate that it’s not Berlin Design Week, it’s Berlin Fashion Week.”
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