ベルリンで、GmbHは悲しみと優雅のためのスペースを創り出す

“I don’t really know how you are meant to respond to how the world is right now, it just feels so extremely violent.”

Designer Benjamin Huseby offers this reflection in the aftermath of GmbH’s Spring/Summer 2026 show in Berlin, seated beside his co-founder, Serhat Işık. It marks the designers’ third show in their brand’s birthplace, and their fourth since their searing Paris outing, where they made headlines with garments meticulously constructed from hand-embroidered keffiyehs sourced from a refugee camp connected to Gaza. That show concluded with an unflinching call: for a ceasefire, for the release of hostages, and for a free Palestine. Fast forward to now, to a show preceded by 58 seconds of silence – one for each of the approximately 1,000 people killed in Gaza. According to the UN, 31 per cent of them were children. 

In times like this, GmbH’s platform has felt less aesthetic than existential. Huseby, of Pakistani-Norwegian heritage, and Işık, Turkish-German, have long used their work to articulate a shared diasporic identity, rooted in Berlin but reverberating far beyond it. Though the brand emerged from the city’s throbbing queer nightlife scene, its community has grown broader, more complex. On this night, they came out again in full.

Since returning to their native Berlin, where they now show during Berlin Fashion Week with the financial and PR scaffolding of Reference Studios’ Intervention platform and the styling of Another Man’s Ellie Grace Cumming, Huseby and Işık have been charting an evolution in their design ethos. What once felt driven by the urgency of the present has softened into a mode of introspection, one that gazes backwards as much as it looks ahead. Nostalgic recollections of youth have become a kind of balm for the duo-designers shaped, and shaken, by the turbulence of recent years, and intent on producing work that resonates with empathy, insistent that their chins are raised, and determined to keep their heads above fashion’s ability to drift into apoliticism.

“We’ve leaned a lot on our families,” says Işık. “The last collection was also about our fathers and forefathers coming to Europe. This collection has actually been about childhood memories, particularly memories of coming of age. We’ve been revisiting weddings, circumcisions as young Muslim boys, and all these major events that are on VHS tapes we haven’t seen in 20 or 25 years. So we carve those memories out, and we just lean on them. It created a new family bond. We’ve re-bonded, in a way.”

That spirit of return echoed through the collection. Behind the stark facade of Messe Berlin, the show unfolded in a bright, circular hall, where a 37-degree sun filtered through floor-to-ceiling windows and twin staircases curved with operatic poise. Models descended in pairs from opposite sides, to Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear overture – a cue of looming menace. The looks seemed to mirror, shadow and confront each other, tracing loops around the room in a pursuit, before disappearing up the stairs like a game of cat and mouse.

The duo still trade in some sartorial experimentation, but like many designers working today, they focus less on charting new territory and instead on fortifying the world they’ve already built. As such, GmbH’s greatest hits came to play. Tailoring cut with forensic precision: sculptural, film-noir shoulders tapered at the waist with ties knotted at the back, often paired with silky shorts and the occasional flash of shiny leather boots. Elsewhere, baggy boxer shorts with thick Muay Thai-style waistbands cinched the torso and exposed the leg, winking at the strain of Berlin hedonism that runs through the label’s DNA. Shirts morphed into ponchos, billowing as they moved in procession, while the brand’s signature dropped-shoulder silhouette was reimagined as a theatrical ballooning gown, swaddling the body in voluminous taffeta while leaving the clavicles bare. 

T-shirts were plastered in banknotes, a nod to the designers’ youth and the ceremonial traditions of their Turkish and Middle Eastern heritage, where cash covers the bodies of those being celebrated – festive rites of honour rendered literal in fabric. A hoodie was embroidered with a didactic statement: Peace be upon you for what you patiently endure. “It feels like an apt statement at this time, and it’s a quote from the Quran. Translated,” says Işık. 

What lingered was not just the precision of the clothes, but the emotional calibration of the entire affair. “How can you revisit your childhood without feeling devastated? And how can we stay sane in a world led by psychopaths?” the press notes plead. In the face of escalating violence and cultural dislocation, Huseby and Işık offer something rarer than outrage: a sustained meditation on tenderness, memory, and the fragile architectures of belonging. In doing so, they gave form to grief, and allowed beauty to exist beside it. Fashion may be an unlikely vessel for such co-existence, but in GmbH’s hands, it remains one of the few mediums still capable of holding it.

“I don’t really know how you are meant to respond to how the world is right now, it just feels so extremely violent.”

Designer Benjamin Huseby offers this reflection in the aftermath of GmbH’s Spring/Summer 2026 show in Berlin, seated beside his co-founder, Serhat Işık. It marks the designers’ third show in their brand’s birthplace, and their fourth since their searing Paris outing, where they made headlines with garments meticulously constructed from hand-embroidered keffiyehs sourced from a refugee camp connected to Gaza. That show concluded with an unflinching call: for a ceasefire, for the release of hostages, and for a free Palestine. Fast forward to now, to a show preceded by 58 seconds of silence – one for each of the approximately 1,000 people killed in Gaza. According to the UN, 31 per cent of them were children. 

In times like this, GmbH’s platform has felt less aesthetic than existential. Huseby, of Pakistani-Norwegian heritage, and Işık, Turkish-German, have long used their work to articulate a shared diasporic identity, rooted in Berlin but reverberating far beyond it. Though the brand emerged from the city’s throbbing queer nightlife scene, its community has grown broader, more complex. On this night, they came out again in full.

Since returning to their native Berlin, where they now show during Berlin Fashion Week with the financial and PR scaffolding of Reference Studios’ Intervention platform and the styling of Another Man’s Ellie Grace Cumming, Huseby and Işık have been charting an evolution in their design ethos. What once felt driven by the urgency of the present has softened into a mode of introspection, one that gazes backwards as much as it looks ahead. Nostalgic recollections of youth have become a kind of balm for the duo-designers shaped, and shaken, by the turbulence of recent years, and intent on producing work that resonates with empathy, insistent that their chins are raised, and determined to keep their heads above fashion’s ability to drift into apoliticism.

“We’ve leaned a lot on our families,” says Işık. “The last collection was also about our fathers and forefathers coming to Europe. This collection has actually been about childhood memories, particularly memories of coming of age. We’ve been revisiting weddings, circumcisions as young Muslim boys, and all these major events that are on VHS tapes we haven’t seen in 20 or 25 years. So we carve those memories out, and we just lean on them. It created a new family bond. We’ve re-bonded, in a way.”

That spirit of return echoed through the collection. Behind the stark facade of Messe Berlin, the show unfolded in a bright, circular hall, where a 37-degree sun filtered through floor-to-ceiling windows and twin staircases curved with operatic poise. Models descended in pairs from opposite sides, to Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear overture – a cue of looming menace. The looks seemed to mirror, shadow and confront each other, tracing loops around the room in a pursuit, before disappearing up the stairs like a game of cat and mouse.

The duo still trade in some sartorial experimentation, but like many designers working today, they focus less on charting new territory and instead on fortifying the world they’ve already built. As such, GmbH’s greatest hits came to play. Tailoring cut with forensic precision: sculptural, film-noir shoulders tapered at the waist with ties knotted at the back, often paired with silky shorts and the occasional flash of shiny leather boots. Elsewhere, baggy boxer shorts with thick Muay Thai-style waistbands cinched the torso and exposed the leg, winking at the strain of Berlin hedonism that runs through the label’s DNA. Shirts morphed into ponchos, billowing as they moved in procession, while the brand’s signature dropped-shoulder silhouette was reimagined as a theatrical ballooning gown, swaddling the body in voluminous taffeta while leaving the clavicles bare. 

T-shirts were plastered in banknotes, a nod to the designers’ youth and the ceremonial traditions of their Turkish and Middle Eastern heritage, where cash covers the bodies of those being celebrated – festive rites of honour rendered literal in fabric. A hoodie was embroidered with a didactic statement: Peace be upon you for what you patiently endure. “It feels like an apt statement at this time, and it’s a quote from the Quran. Translated,” says Işık. 

What lingered was not just the precision of the clothes, but the emotional calibration of the entire affair. “How can you revisit your childhood without feeling devastated? And how can we stay sane in a world led by psychopaths?” the press notes plead. In the face of escalating violence and cultural dislocation, Huseby and Işık offer something rarer than outrage: a sustained meditation on tenderness, memory, and the fragile architectures of belonging. In doing so, they gave form to grief, and allowed beauty to exist beside it. Fashion may be an unlikely vessel for such co-existence, but in GmbH’s hands, it remains one of the few mediums still capable of holding it.