GmbH is Them’s 2024 Now Award honoree in Fashion. The Now Awards honor 10 LGBTQ+ vanguards at the forefront of culture and change today. Read more here.
GmbH’s Berlin headquarters is easy to miss. There’s no gilded signage, no grandiose atelier entrance. As I walk past the smell of fresh falafel wafting from a nearby Lebanese restaurant and enter a nondescript building’s inner courtyard, it’s only the sight of a mannequin propped against a window that confirms I’ve arrived at the acclaimed fashion label’s studio. Even the brand’s name obscures; a GmbH (the merciful abbreviation of “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung”) is simply the German equivalent of an LLC. When co-founders Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Işık launched the label in 2016, they chose the moniker as a way of distancing themselves from their work, à la Martin Margiela. But behind the clever façade is a brand that’s deeply personal — and, in turn, political.
Stepping into the studio, the praise heaped onto the label feels left at the door. Huseby finishes a final task with their small team as Işık makes tea, readjusting a pair of club-ready sunglasses he’ll remove only briefly over the next hour. We settle into the back office, where the heart of their brand is most visible.
As Huseby sits down at his desk, Işık reclines into an office chair. Nearby, a lone mannequin wears a standout piece from the duo’s latest collection: a boxy red jacket, expertly tailored with draped shoulders and patterned in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh. Rather than outsourcing the construction to some far-off factory or luxury atelier, the designers sourced keffiyehs hand-embroidered by Palestinian and Syrian refugees living in Jordan’s Jerash “Gaza” refugee camp through a collaboration with the Social Enterprise Project, a fashion business that aims to lift thousands of refugees out of poverty.
The collection, titled “UNTITLED NATIONS,” served as a treatise against nationalism and the demonization of marginalized communities, especially Europe’s Muslim population — a subject in which the two designers are well-versed. Huseby and Işık often draw inspiration from their own cultural and personal histories as Norwegian-Pakistani and Turkish-German children of Muslim immigrants, respectively, as well as their experiences as queer creatives who came up in Berlin’s underground art scene. The result? Seven years of critically lauded collections that’ve shaken up the stuffy fashion world. None more than their latest.
On January 22, as GmbH staged the final event of Paris Fashion Week’s menswear collections, an electric current rippled through the air before a single model walked the runway. Draped in white keffiyehs, Huseby and Işık delivered an unusual, soul-stirring 10-minute speech calling attention to Israel’s brutal and devastating bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which at that point had already killed 25,000 Palestinians. “We have called for a ceasefire now, a release of all hostages, a free Palestine, and an end to the occupation — all demands we think should be uncontroversial,” Işık said.
The pair then began to quote from Indian author Arundhati Roy’s 2002 speech on post-9/11 prejudice. As they reached the end of their statement, Huseby broke down. Pausing for a moment as many in the audience wiped away tears, he choked out the final words: “Perhaps things will come worse, and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”
It was a rare shout from within the fashion industry’s historically apolitical echo chamber, yet it was par for the course for GmbH. “We felt that we didn’t really have a choice,” Huseby explains to me. “If we hadn’t made a statement, then we wouldn’t have done a show. From the beginning, GmbH has always been about using fashion norms as a Trojan horse of positive change.”
The speech became one of the most viral moments of Paris Fashion Week, and the collection was almost universally praised by critics. But for the designers, the response felt bittersweet. “We were the only ones during the whole fashion season that said something so explicit, which we were disappointed by,” says Huseby.
“A lot of people came to us saying, ‘Oh, it’s so brave,’” Işık adds. “I don’t think it’s brave what we did. It was just our basic human needs that compelled us to do that. I don’t think there was any bravery attached to that.”
Huseby and Işık have never shied away from using GmbH as a tool to interrogate both their past and our present. “Even though it was more graphic with us standing there saying something on a podium, we’ve always been who we are in each collection,” Işik explains. This has resulted in seasons inspired by their migrant fathers and the German expression “Gastarbeiter” (or “guest worker”) for Spring 2018; by intertwining medieval Islamic and Viking histories for Fall 2018; by the racial discrimination their mothers overcame in the 1960s for Spring 2019; by the protective aura of Nazar amulets and “evil eyes” in Spring 2020; and by their queer childhoods in religious schools for Fall 2022. The pair have even packed cultural commentary into bodies of work that aren’t steeped in their own personal histories, referencing everything from the tech paranoia of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 film World on a Wire (Fall 2021) to the noxious trend of white designers going on “cultural safaris” (Spring 2022).
For all the gravitas they bring to their collections, the designers also know how to have fun. Huseby and Işik did, after all, meet on a Berlin dance floor in 2015. The nightclub, with its bone-shaking bass, sweating masses of twisted bodies, and symbolism as a haven for the queer and marginalized, is ingrained in the DNA of GmbH. But the brand’s aesthetic can also be traced back even further, to Işik’s early flirtations with fashion and construction. Already knitting and crocheting by the age of five, one of his core teenage memories revolves around a specific word: tension.
“I remember buying a T-shirt that was very cropped, but I was very nervous,” he says. “I remember how it made me feel and how concerned I was with how my community would feel about it. That tension always stayed with me; I was not allowed to wear it to the mosque. Those spaces were [for] males only and very charged. That tension always felt sexual to me, in addition to just being obsessed with wanting to understand the construction of clothes. That is what GmbH is about today. The tension.”
As Işık’s prowess for tailoring has grown, GmbH has become known for gender-subverting garments that drip with sexuality; their menswear regularly reveals shoulders, accentuates waistlines, and features sharp-cut necklines that draw the eye straight down to the models’ often muscular cleavage. The subtle eroticism and technical mastery was an instant hit. Within the first year, the label garnered critical acclaim from the likes of Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, and the New York Times; in 2017, after debuting just their second collection, GmbH secured a nomination for the coveted LVMH Prize.
Of the many iconic looks that the brand has released — the repurposing of Princess Diana’s “revenge dress” as erotic menswear for Fall 2021 comes to mind — their signature “it” item may be a pair of pants with a fetishistic double-zip crotch that looks tailor-made for easy access. First debuted in 2016, the piece is adapted from traditional German carpenter pants, reborn as a form-fitting, fetishistic, club-ready garment rendered in PVC.
Huseby and Işik also see the label as a tool for community building. Since the start, they’ve made a point of employing their creative circle as the faces of the brand — a choice that initially caused a stir in the stubbornly conservative fashion world. “They said our runway looked aggressive, obviously because it was predominantly Black and brown models,” Işik scornfully recalls. “How can it be wrong to represent yourself authentically? Most of these people in our first shows or lookbooks were our friends, and people are generally threatened by that.”
What began in part as a cost-cutting measure has since cemented the designers as part of a network filled with creatives who are also blooming in their own respective fields. This symbiosis was fully realized with the April release of “GmbH: An Anthology of Music for Fashion Shows 2016-2023 Vol. 1.” The 12-track album, created alongside their long-time music collaborators LABOUR, features the likes of MJ Harper, Khyam Allami, Nene H, Fatima Al Qadiri, and Lyra Pramuk — artists who have all contributed to the brand’s runway shows over the past seven years. “The people who are on the album now are our friends. Some were in our very first lookbook, ” Işik says with pride. “None of us knew what they would produce or create down the line.”
For most of GmbH’s history, existing within Berlin’s creative bubble has been a blessing — but the situation has changed drastically. Since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, the German state has committed to a full-throated defense of Israel, even as many human rights experts have called Israel’s ongoing siege on Gaza, which has now killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, genocidal. It has also laid the groundwork for swift and severe efforts to censor pro-Palestinian voices across the cultural sphere.
Over the past 8 months, Pro-Palestinian artists and activists across Germany have had their platforms taken away, projects defunded, and events and exhibitions cancelled. In November, the Jewish artist Candice Breitz — who was born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa — had a major exhibition canceled at Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery because of her “controversial statements in the context of Hamas’ war of aggression against the state of Israel.” On social media, Breitz had criticized Israel’s bombardment of Gaza while also condemning the Hamas attack. In Berlin, the state-funded Oyoun Cultural Center was defunded over allegations of alleged antisemitic incidents, which were later deemed unfounded by a German court. For many artists, the façade of Berlin as a progressive, creative capital slipped away over night.
“A lot of people, when they come to Berlin specifically, [are] quite naïve about how conservative Germany actually is,” explains Huseby. “You can live out certain liberal fantasies in Berlin, but there’s still so much repression. For Işik, the liberal fantasy chafes against his childhood memories. “That was just an illusion; I grew up next to Nazis,” he says of his adolescence in Herne, a city in the country’s industrial Ruhr Valley. “I’ve always known that Germany has this face and [has] somehow managed to create an image that is not that, but it’s always been there.”
If there is one silver lining, it’s the connections the designers have fostered outside of fashion circles. With their studio in Kreuzberg and their home in Neukölln — two areas of Berlin with large Arab populations — the pair are deeply ingrained in their community. They’ve seen their neighbors endure racial profiling from police and watched as Palestinian flags were ripped away at the protests they regularly attend. “Going to meetings and meeting up with activists and workshops. That definitely feels like a community,” says Huseby. “It is for a very specific cause, but it is the first time in a long time that this way of gathering has felt very meaningful.”
Though the pair are game to dive deep into these kinds of political discussions, they are just as eager to work. There’s a Spring 2025 collection to finalize, everyone in the tucked-away studio seems ready to keep making really fucking good garments: Clothes ready to go from the runway to the dancefloor. Clothes that, as Huseby puts it, can make you feel “empowered, protected, and sexy.” At this remark, the mood in the room lightens and sunlight beams into the office. Laughing, Işik says, “That’s the most fashion answer we gave today.”
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