Adriano Sack is a Berlin-based journalist who heads up the style department of German Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag. Here, he profiles the German capital's menswear and womenswear label GmbH.
It's roughly one hour before GmbH's Paris Fashion Week show is about to start. Hanging on the racks backstage are new iterations of the label's signature double-zip pants, mysterious jewelry that seems both tribal and scientific, various pieces with arabesque print, and intricately constructed jackets and coats. A cosmic theme holds everything together. The two creative directors, Serhat Isik and Benjamin-Alexander Huseby, keep their cool, despite the fact the area is full of people with questions.
Where are the gloves for Ismail? What is Sheherazade doing? And who is that cute family?
The last question is easily answered. An older man with a gray mustache watches on as his son, Serhat, hugs two little boys with vigor and empathy. It’s a Paris Fashion Week moment of the most unlikely kind.
A wise lady once told me that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. In that regard, the first impression that Huseby, a full-time photographer at the time, made on me was nothing but genius.
This dark-haired, focused man with a winning smile came to the office of a Berlin-based fashion magazine where I worked around 2012 to discuss potential collaborations. Curiously, he had a basket of mushrooms under his arm that he had picked somewhere in Brandenburg. Maybe he'd arrived straight from the forest, but it felt more like a statement. He was self-confident, close to nature, and slightly weird in the most endearing way.
Huseby founded GmbH with fashion designer Isik in 2016. The name is the German abbreviation for a legal form of enterprise, like "Ltd" means in English ("Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung" literally translates as "Society With Limited Liability"). There is something affectionately clumsy about the name; it almost seems to be mocking the infamous German bureaucratic system. Even the website is designed like one of those torturous forms that one has to fill out when applying for a new passport.
GmbH's creative practice, however, is quite the opposite. When they started out, Huseby and Isik shot photographs mostly with friends and collaborators. "We never used the word collective," stressed Isik in a recent phone conversation. He has the body of a martial arts fighter, likes precision when it comes to interpretations of their activities, and is happy slashing anything that he considers to be superficial, sloppily worded, or plainly stupid. The brand, sold in 60 stores worldwide including tastemakers like Dover Street Market, is 100 percent independent. Notably, GmbH's first collection addressed issues that now are shaking the entire industry: diversity, sustainability and the nagging question of what luxury has come to mean.
Luxury was not their starting point, though. Huseby worked as a photographer and shot for the likes of Fantastic Man, while Isik ran his own label that was not so far removed from what would later become recognized as the GmbH aesthetic. (His first collection was stolen from a store where it was presented.) Both were avid participants of the nocturnal pleasures Berlin has to offer (the international keyword would be Berghain). Upon meeting, they instantly clicked.
So did the fashion world. It helped that Huseby had worked for a lot of the best international fashion magazines (his images were much different from the "typical" look). They say every brand needs a story. GmbH had several.
They worked with models with very different body types — non-binary, elderly, super buff — and from places across the world. They also enlisted friends like Stefano Pilati to walk for them. "Nobody used many models from India and Pakistan," says Huseby. He is half-Norwegian, half-Pakistani, while Isik has Turkish parents and grew up in Herne, West Germany. Their backgrounds are the trigger for political statements and aesthetic choices. They wrote "Randomly Chosen" on one jacket, which is the term for racial profiling at country borders (something both have experienced again and again). Obviously their fashion is not ethnic, but there are references and hints. Some cuts remind of traditional Turkish or Arab clothes; the "evil eye“ was the main print in their Spring/Summer 2020 collection.
"I was excited and happy when I saw the evil eye," says stylist Dogukan Nesanir, who works for V, Nike, and dresses celebrities like Troye Sivan. "Every Turkish grandmother has it in her house, and I even have one in my Berlin office." He claims that GmbH’s inclusivity feels organic and authentic, in comparison to brands that did not care about non-slim or non-white models until they had to.
Isik and Husbey have not changed the industry, but they are a very vocal newcomer with the right questions. How fundamental and lasting the changes of the last year will be is up to the consumer.
Artists, though, are not only measured by their social impact, but by their unique aesthetic vision. In other words, are the clothes truly original? In GmbH's case, my opinion would be yes. Their visible zipper pants are savvy references to the unform of German carpenters and Jean Colonna, the cult Belgian designer. Within a few years, they added womenswear, formal tailoring, and some really good sneakers. Isik and Huseby are not eying the next vacant designer position at a big house. Their work is deeply personal, based on their cultural backgrounds and their lives in Berlin. It is work that can only be done by them. And that tends to be the art or design that matters.
The starting point for the new collection was a documentary that the two designers watched about the origins of the universe. The title, "Ylem," describes the period shortly after the big bang (also it sounds like family in Turkish). "We dug into our own history and culture. We refocused on the essence of GmbH," says Serhat. The coats and dresses have an architectural quality — even more so than usual — that is sometimes fluid and organic, sometimes deliciously brutalist. This is one very specific and potentially lasting quality of their work: an unapologetic, in-your-face-ness that Berlin is universally cherished for.
The second time I met Huseby was at a private dinner party that he hosted. It was a humid and hot summer night, the air in the dining room was hardly breathable. We stood on the fire escape smoking when clouds — a kind that I had never seen in Germany — yellow-gray-ish, sticky-looking, apocalyptic started clustering. Minutes later they relieved themselves in a dramatic thunderstorm. The next day meteorologists claimed that sand from the Sahara in North Africa had traveled through the air, all the way to north Germany. Rather than a night of gloomy weather, I like to believe it was a sign heralding in a new force of nature to be reckoned with.
