GMBH SS26
There comes a point in the process of mourning where grief reaches numbness. The complete disbelief and awe at reality’s seeming unreality, that the only thing left to do is disassociate. “We no longer know how to act or feel,” Benjamin Huseby and Serhat Işik of GmbH wrote in their show notes. “How can people go about their daily lives?”
As genocide, backed by Western governments and conglomerates, continues in Gaza, 500 or so high-fashion guests filed into an air-conditioned ballroom outside Berlin’s city centre. Between designer outfits, celebrity appearances, and warranted anticipation for the collection, global suffering was the last thing on any person’s mind. That was, until a deep voice announced that guests would partake in 58 seconds of silence before the show, one second for every thousand Palestinian killed since October 2023 and not counting those killed prior.
Titled “Imitation of Life”, the collection that followed was an expression of the two’s feelings of emotional absurdity at simply functioning in the middle of global and moral collapse. Clothes made during a time of surrealism and dissociation, where one feels like a ghost living in an unreal world.
But rather than horror, this season the designers turned to something more sentimental. “This collection is not about cruelty, death or destruction,” they said. “[but] trying to come out the other side, still human.”
For the duo, that meant a return to childhood. Audiences received an envelope containing a show appendix, showing diary excerpts and old family photos. Some of the looks that appeared on the runway directly correlated. A black and white picture of boys with dollar bills hanging off their bodies turned into a highly snappable tank top with fake Euros in all directions. A cape worn by Işik at his Sünnet found its way into the billowing sleeves and back of the collection’s chiffon shirting.
Despite the duo’s heavy feelings, there was a lightness in their designs, and not just through the use of weightless fabrics like silk and chiffon. Their signature suiting was mismatched with polkadot and striped boxer shorts, evoking the image of a little boy refusing to properly put on his formal wear. The Berlin-inspired club-wear the brand first became known for came in the form of “Masallah” crop tops, see-through mesh tanks, and pants zipped down to expose the underwear.
However, living through death and destruction is distinct from forgetting it. And GmbH did not forget. Their final set of looks was filled with overtly political references, from military-style shirts, feminist pussy-bow ties, and chiffon scarves that covered models’ faces like a mourning veil. The closing looks were operatic: satin-textured, sculptural gowns in grey and black, whose shape resembled an urn.
In high fashion, political activism can be tone-deaf, contradictory and opportunistic. But since their inception and confirmed by repetition, a strong ideological stance is at the heart of GmbH as a brand.
For Spring/Summer 2026, their fight was not on the frontlines. Rather, it was a more nuanced one: how to remain radical in an exclusive and elite cultural space, whose existence and success are so dependent on the capital of the ruling class?
Huseby and Işik have found their answer in the creation of beautiful clothing that not only remains rooted in but also reminds us of reality. Their acts of small social disruption, of forcing silence, and of naming genocide are radical in the conservative and often politically apathetic face of high fashion.
“If you didn’t name the genocide by its true name a year ago, naming it now is meaningless to the dead,” declared their diary. “May their ghosts forever haunt you.”
Words by SHARYN BUDIARTO
