GmbH AW26
GmbH AW26 & the Weight of Being Visibly Political
GmbH’s Autumn/Winter 2026 collection arrived in Berlin on Monday with the gravity of an urgent conversation caught midway. There was no theatrical eruption, no bid for reinvention. Instead, the show felt like movement against the current: tailoring tightened, silhouettes held firm, fabrics weighed down with implication. In a season where many brands sought relief through softness or neutral minimalism, GmbH presented clothes that appeared to brace themselves against the world they inhabit.
To truly understand this collection is to understand the particular burden the brand carries. Since its inception, GmbH has been positioned — often by the industry rather than its own designers — as a moral and political barometer: a label expected to articulate the migrant experience, queer life, Muslim visibility and working-class precarity of the country’s capital all at once. This expectation has since calcified into a kind of public contract, with each season reviewed not only for what it offers aesthetically, but for what it proposes, defends or refuses on behalf of others.
This season didn’t attempt to reject that responsibility. But it did show what happens when political fashion stops playing to the gallery and starts enduring. Inspired by ‘Friedensangst’, which means ‘fear of peace’ — a phrase ironically used in recent news reports to describe the growing instability of the arms industry amidst calls for ceasefire rippling across the planet — designers Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Isik based the collection around tailoring as both language and metaphor. Jackets were structured yet slightly off-centre, shoulders squared but never heroic. Trousers fell with purpose, sometimes cropped, sometimes pooled, resisting the clean resolution of classic menswear. The effect was one of discipline under pressure: garments that knew their purpose but bore the marks of constant use. If earlier GmbH collections flirted more openly with provocation, this collection felt intentional and resolute, almost procedural.
In 2026, the political climate that once rewarded overt symbolism now increasingly penalises it. In the throes of an economic downturn, ideological fatigue and creative director churn, customers and audiences alike — because there is a distinction; one that brands must remain cognizant of and savvy to — are growing increasingly suspicious toward anything that feels like virtue signalling without receipts. This season absorbed that reality, embedding its politics in cut and casting, rather than slogan or shock (although Huseby was spotted backstage with ‘Friedensangst’ emblazoned across his chest).
Casting, of course, remained a central plot device as GmbH’s models continue to reflect the bodies and faces rarely centred in luxury, but who are the natural occupants of what these clothes represent. There is a refusal here to aestheticize marginality for novelty’s sake. Instead, the garments assume a particular brand of lived experience unique to these communities: clothing that protects, conceals, asserts and lasts. In amongst their quiet nods to classic GmbH fetishism, there was a processional quality to the long march of dark, gothic figures dressed in all black storming down the cold, isolated runway. Set in the brutalist architecture of Mitte’s former-power-station-turned-exhibition-space Kraftwerk against a hauntingly beautiful backlight obscuring the audience, Berlin’s presence and the contradictions it grapples with daily were inescapable: promises of freedom alongside bureaucratic violence; subcultures coexisting with gentrification and surveillance. Similarly, the grounded palette of the collection and restrained silhouettes avoided warmth or excess; instead offering intrigue, cause to pause for deliberation.
Trading vapid polish in favour of tactile curiosity, the clothes seemed to insist on time and the exhaustion that comes with it, not just creatively but culturally. Titled Doppelgänger, their inspiration for this collection also travelled through time to the good old days when the designers felt free and aligned with Germany’s political ambition in the depths of Berlin’s queer club scene, before watching history violently repeat itself through cycles of war and authoritarianism. As the industry continues to look to designers from marginalized backgrounds for politically versed substance, and pigeon-hole them for it, I couldn’t help but consider a similar sense of fatigue that must come with being constantly conscious, constantly intelligible, constantly symbolic. Political fashion is rarely allowed opacity; it has to explain, justify and behave impeccably, often all at once.
So in a sense, Huseby and Isik’s confidence in not needing to exaggerate their rhetoric could also be read as a form of resistance. One built on a decade of consistent insistence on political dialogue and awareness of the world’s harsh realities for the disenfranchised, signalling the importance of earning your community’s trust through authentic representation. Trust that has also earned them the right to now refuse to over-communicate, a defence mechanism one might consider necessary for a brand that wishes to sustain this role without being hardened by it. Walking that fine line between aesthetics and politics, their precision tailoring and recognizable codes now provide a safe space at the crossroads of fashion’s glamour and politics’ pervasiveness for sustainable engagement with emotional labour.
That, in fact, just might be this collection’s most triumphant gesture: the promise of continuity.
credits
words — karina so.
photography — karina so.
design — karina so.
