PARIS – The invitation to their last catwalk display, in mid-June here, read like a formal governmental notice in Germany. On a simple piece of paper, in black and white, it came signed and sealed, replete with a return address (in German) from “GmbH, the limited liability company.”
“We play a lot with the German bureaucratic aesthetic and language,” Benjamin Alexander Huseby, a cofounder of the buzzy Berlin-based fashion brand GmbH, told WWD.
“You are very used to [it] from very early on if you are an immigrant child in Germany,” added Serhat Isik, the label’s other cofounder. He knows, as one himself.
Isik, who is 30, is a first-generation German of Turkish descent. And 38-year-old Huseby, of Norwegian-Pakistani heritage, grew up in Norway.
From their start in May 2016, cultural mixes and a sense of otherness have informed their brand, which sent down the runway for spring 2019 an exquisitely crafted collection dubbed “Survival Strategies.” The show included GmbH’s first complete women’s wear line, with 22 looks.
Berlin shapes their approach, too. “It’s almost like a cliché, but [the city] almost has a sort of anti-fashion attitude. It is more about other things — counter-culture and music, and youth-culture and art,” said Huseby. “We
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