If fashion is a barometer of society, then the runway is its loudest and purest megaphone. Since their first show six years ago, GMBH founders Benjamin Alexander Huseby, who is Norwegian-born and of Pakistani origin, and Serhat Işık, who is Turkish-German, have always engaged in questions of identity, politics, sexuality, division and difference.
On Sunday, the Berlin designers prefaced this show with an impassioned 10-minute speech that addressed the present conflict in the Middle East and geopolitical tensions further afield, all in the context of those questions that have long been central to their work and practice. Işık explained: “As fashion designers we are normally left to express our thoughts through clothing and leave the rest to the imagination. But we live in dangerous times, when the precision of words is needed.” There were tears at the lectern and in the audience as those words came down the runway.
“This is about showing our humanity,” Huseby had explained backstage beforehand: “So much of our work is about the beauty of our heritage and showing the world, in different words, that how we look does not make us terrorists.” Fashion, he added, is part of a healing process, of “decolonizing our own minds and sending a message of openness, humanity, and tolerance.”
GMBH showcased Işık’s powerful talent for tailoring, which was conceived and cut to amplify their message of cultural expression and mutual tolerance. Entitled Untitled Nations, the collection included keffiyehs worked as jackets, and other jackets with lapels informed by prayer rugs. Further pieces included a hoodie with a distorted UN logo. It would be remiss not to mention that Huseby and Işık delivered several sharp-looking croc-embossed leather jackets and some very well-cut trousers. At this show though it was the shape of their text, not their textiles, that will be most remembered.
