Fashion: GmbH’s SS21 Collection Draws Inspiration from Berlin’s Queer Scene.

Since the launch of their label, GmbH, in 2016, designers Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Isik looked to Berlin’s queer scene for inspiration. From the city’s underground creative community to the bustling dance floors, the queer aesthetic is also strongly rooted in representation and diversity.

Due to COVID-19 disrupting the Paris Fashion Week schedule, the duo decided to stage their own virtual runway show. The result is a fashion film called Season Of Migration To The North, which is in collaboration with Norwegian artist Lars Laumann and Sudanese activist and architect Eddie Esmail. The film feature excerpts from Esmail’s diary that document the days before he was arrested in Khartoum. Esmail was participating in a fashion show, before it was raided by the police, who incarcerated all of “the boys who they thought looked gay” and the girls that “looked immoral”.

“It embodies how fashion can be a political act, a transgressive act,” says Benjamin Alexander Huseby in an interview with i-D. “We have this platform on the official schedule of Paris and we’re not doing a show, so why not show that as our fashion show? It felt so powerful to take that and bring it to the centre stage of the fashion world. We wanted to amplify that message of the power of a fashion show.”