BERLIN, BABY!
*13 Berlin SS26 Moments That Rewired Fashion’s DNA
(and Our Nervous Systems)
written SARAH ARENDTS
documented NICOLAI SAUER
Berlin throws itself headfirst, limbs flailing, into the spring/summer 2026 abyss and claws its way back with glitter-streaked cheekbones, melted mesh, and stories to tell from behind veils of sweat and synthetic nostalgia. Restraint stays buried under cobblestones.
Thirteen houses, collectives, renegades, and reverents surfaced from the city’s creative swamps to orchestrate one long slow gasp of textile rebellion, post-dystopian tenderness, and neurotic elegance. This week held no boundaries, it performed itself as an exorcism in daylight.
CLARA COLETTE MIRAMO
SS26
CLARA COLETTE MIRAMO
SS26
Tulle trailed like it had somewhere better to be, catching on the carpet rolled out in front of the Volksbühne, which stood there massive and unbothered, probably thinking about its next revolution or cigarette, while CLARA COLETTE MIRAMON turned the whole street into a makeshift ward where care wasn’t whispered, it was strutted, dragged, flung over shoulders like it weighed nothing and everything at once.
Hospital beds leaned into Pilates machines like an inside joke about wellness, uniforms cut from memory walked alongside jackets that looked like they’d been trained in restraint. Sequins clung where tenderness had been. It all moved like aftermath, like someone tried to tidy up a feeling and gave up halfway through. And when the short wedding dress showed up with a real scoliosis brace tucked underneath, no one gasped because everyone already knew, this was what happens when you hold it in for too long and decide to let it wear you instead.
Gender-melt rituals expanding in neoprene priesthoods, metallics slick with sweat theology, garments summoned from the intersection of sacred longing and queer futurism. IMITATION OF LIFE, GMBH’s SS26 collection, unfolded as an autobiographical opera, where every silhouette became a protest and a prayer, shaped by bodies negotiating desire, diaspora, or devotion. Layered mesh and synthetic gloss coated skin like ex-votos, while deep-cut tailoring paid homage to faith communities, the kind that cradle and the kind that exile. There was no clean line between theology and sensuality, no clear boundary between mourning and joy—only garments vibrating with ancestral heat, with techno as liturgy and muscle memory as myth.
GMBH
SS26
GMBH
SS26
GMBH
SS26
GMBH
SS26
GMBH
SS26
LAURA GERTE’s SS26 collection, LOOPED & BOUND, moved like a spiral collapsing into itself without conclusion, without hierarchy, just perpetual orbit. The designer’s vision crawled through movement and memory, with upcycled silks twisted into unstable elegance, techno-lingerie suspended in friction and delay, each element vibrating beneath the distorted pulse of a soundscape by RIFTS. Fashion slipped sideways, became gesture, became echo, became the choreography of mesh folding into another gesture, and then another, endlessly. Gerte designed with repetition as ritual, layering rhythm over rhythm until the silhouettes moved with the logic of instinct, tracing patterns in the air like choreography inherited from future bodies.
A whisper steeped in starch, pressed into precision and then unraveled by a quiet kind of defiance that trades volume for voltage. IDEN’s language unfolds in shell-like layers, protective yet porous, where embellishment slips from memory and off-white ferments into something less polite, more possessed. Drapery loops like an invocation conjured to summon breath across space, pulling tension through pleats and folds that gather meaning without anchoring themselves in touch. Garments hover within a field of elsewhere, calibrated to radiate beyond gesture, atmosphere thick with the trace of bodies they neither await nor dismiss.
LAURA GERTE
SS26
LAURA GERTE
SS26
IDEN
SS26
JULIAN ZIGERLI slid into SS26 like a kid who just discovered the soft side of chaos and decided to wrap himself in it head to toe. Raver therapy disguised as suiting, cuddlewear torn into layers that giggle and sting in equal measure. Airbrushed tuxedos floated through rooms like serotonin hallucinations, plush renderings of memories misfiled under joy and juvenile revolt.
A palette that threw tantrums and love letters with the same gesture, textures with emotional volatility dialed up to maximum volume. Zigerli designed as if vulnerability wore platform sneakers and glittered under club lights at noon, as if print therapy were a real treatment plan and Berlin the only qualified practitioner.
If denim could sweat under pressure, this is where it would happen—spiraling through DAGGER’s SS26 collection. DAGGER cut silhouettes like hostile contracts, threading control through denim and cotton with surgical spite. Berlin’s dark romance with dominance gathered new momentum stitched in chrome, bias seams, and unease. Tailoring glared rather than soothed, and each look stepped like it remembered every rule just long enough to devour it from within. Dinner dresses itself in fear beside this—entering the mouth like a dare, tearing at the gums, staining the teeth, turning digestion into performance and etiquette into exquisite disarray.
JULIAN ZIGERLI
SS26
JULIAN ZIGERLI
SS26
DAGGER
SS26
SIA ARNIKA
SS26
Stretch limos humming under dead fluorescents, sour teenage lust smeared across collarbones and knees, Summer Time Sadness gliding through stale heat in garments warped by longing and daylight regret—SIA ARNIKA’s SS26 collection, titled IMITATION OF LIFE, wrapped itself around the moment before the ache forms. See-through lingerie clung like memory carved into skin, each look trembling with aftermath already present in the air, the silence before touch, the heat before collapse.
SIA ARNIKA constructed silhouettes from longing, textures from hesitation, garments from the unsaid. Every piece whispered like a friend too close to forget, too distant to reach. Nostalgia performed as method and ritual as blueprint. Her runway worked like a scent trail back to something almost remembered, every hemline folding memory into silhouette, every seam threading tension into poise. The ache circled the perimeter before the first step hit the floor, claiming the atmosphere as part of the garment’s architecture.
SIA ARNIKA
SS26
Each look in BUZIGAHILL’s SS26 collection, RETURN TO SENDER 11, arrived like a message in a bottle from somewhere capitalism refused to archive. Designer Bobby Kolade disassembled second-hand shame and rethreaded it into protest-glam hybrids, casting cassava bustiers in the role of resistance, multiverse denim as memoir, refugee embroidery as ancestral inscription. BUZIGAHILL offered a borderless archive of silhouette and sentiment, screaming memory back into fashion’s circuitry, with devotion styled in revolution’s own fabric.
Tailoring exhaled with the heavy breath of memory dragging itself back into form, melancholia crystallised along seams that refused to settle into silence and garments flushed with the sheen of unsaid things leaking through breathless corridors of fabric. Silhouettes swayed in suspended monologue, cassette confessions unraveling in soft warble. KILIAN KERNER cast SS26 in reverberation, the COLLECTIVEFOUR trilogy blooming like sequinned regret scribbled across steam-fogged mirrors, a stage of devotion rendered in textile syntax, the runway pulsing with the intimacy of unfinished sentences dressed in longing’s favourite colours.
BUZIGAHILL
SS26
KILIAN KERNER
SS26
KILIAN KERNER
SS26
Raw hems extended like emotional fractures reframed in yarn, sculptural knits pulled across bodies like shifting tectonic plates of memory, each thread stretched to a threshold where clothing blurred into dermal residue, folding and refolding itself around the possibility of a future identity written in texture alone. MARIA LUEDER’s SS26 emerged less as a collection than as a living rehearsal of shapeshift, a choreography of cloth trained on the tension between form and potential, silhouettes built from the question of how much resistance can soften before it becomes architecture. Tailoring dissolved under the pressure of generative rhythm, folds moving like sap through bark, bloom emerging not from seams but from a kind of textile metabolism that refused inheritance, a cellular rhythm expanding past blueprint and structure, creating silhouettes that no longer asked permission to hold form, simply arriving already in motion.
MARIA LUEDER
SS26
MARIA LUEDER
SS26
They burned their own silhouettes and showed us what survived. Threads extended like live wires dragged through the ash of their own origin, seams unraveling not from weakness but from an intentional logic of undoing, OTTOLINGER’s SS26 refusing structure in favour of combustion performed as elegance, collapse choreographed with precision, fabrics shredded in midair before reassembling themselves into silhouettes that glowed with the aftermath of friction. A love letter not written but scorched into the margins of utility, garments performing the precise moment when tension releases, when structure breaks, when what remains continues to hold the shape of motion.
OTTOLINGER
SS26
OTTOLINGER
SS26
OTTOLINGER
SS26
Unicorn tapestries stretching like echoes across the room, their faded grandeur mirrored in brocades and deadstock silks gathered by DANNY REINKE as if excavated from a cathedral of memory, each fold steeped in liturgical sorrow and stitched devotion. The Hunt unraveled like a ritual caught mid-incantation, spiraling slowly, breath suspended between velvet and vision, garments thick with the weight of fable, corsetry drawn from the pulse of medieval mysticism filtered through a contemporary yearning to embody the sacred without sanctimony. This wasn’t capture, neither was it reverence—it was myth metabolised, desire embroidered into form, forgiveness draped as silhouette, repentance whispered through lace, silk breathing in the rhythm of belief.
DANNY REINKE
SS26
Emerging queer alchemy in full orchestral pomp. Bows the size of grief unfurled across ballroom echoes, latex sleeves gleaming like archival secrets resurfaced beneath moonlit marble, silhouettes thick with sighs that began long before the runway existed and continued somewhere deep inside the fabric’s pulse; ANDREJ GRONAU, with his SS26 symphony of queer monumentality, scored every garment like a scoreless opera, collapsing baroque nostalgia into sculptural provocation, each movement stitched with the audacity of soft futures made flamboyant and serious in equal measure, parading down stone corridors like myth reborn in tulle, confession dressed in gloss, contradiction elevated to sacred discipline.
ANDREJ GRONAU
SS26
ANDREJ GRONAU
SS26
ANDREJ GRONAU
SS26
Fashion arrived in Berlin already whispering in tongues, unraveling with precision across industrial concrete like a hymn half-recalled, mascara trailing down cheekbones carved from afterparties and prophecy, silk folding into smoke with the choreography of ritual fatigue, breath looping into structure just long enough to shimmer before spilling into exhaustion’s embrace. Spring/Summer 2026 consumed the script in full mouthfuls of shredded satin and handed it back with glossed fingernails and eyes glazed from knowing too much too early, the language spoken entirely in gesture, movement, shadow, thread.
Nicolai Sauer caught it all, the residue and the rave, the gestures caught mid-morph, that split-second where fabric becomes echo and sweat becomes syntax. This was a week of a fever dreaming in public, a series of silhouettes mutating into biography with every step. What Berlin offered was contagion—sensation stitched into choreography, archive bleeding into immediacy, garments rising from dust like sentences never finished. The runway was never meant to end; it only flickers, folds, spills outward. Somewhere between the flash and the fold, between the hemline and the held breath, SS26 continues to ripple.
credit all images
(c) Nicolai Sauer