A good closing can make a club night unforgettable. On Monday night, Laura Gerte delivered a worthy end for the fall 2025 edition of Berlin Fashion Week—and the club reference is no coincidence.
In the iconic Kranzler Eck building on Berlin’s Kudamm, Gerte showed her “Looped & Bound” collection in a setting that could easily have turned into a party: The models walked along a spiral runway to an electronic soundtrack created by renowned Berlin-based DJ Gigola and ended up on a central stage, where they continued to perform, choreographed by movement director Dafni Krazoudi.
The techno environment is very much in line with Gerte’s approach to her collection: “I read ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ by Donna Haraway and watched the science fiction anime ‘Ghost in a Shell’ by Mamoru Oshii from 1995. Both are very much about these supposed contrasts between man and machine, artificial and natural. And the collection is a reflection of the thoughts I had about it,” she explains. ”The cyborg is this technology-enhanced human, but what does that mean? We are all glued to our phones, even though our screen time is too high, and we have to ask ourselves if we still want to use Instagram because it’s run by a man who clearly doesn’t align with our values. Against the backdrop of all these questions, the message I want to give is ultimately one of togetherness.”
That worked: The show—her second at Berlin Fashion Week—combined maximum group effort and a minimum of resources. Gerte involved numerous people from the city’s Multisex party collective both in front of and behind the scenes. And the designer works almost exclusively with the principle of upcycling. She sources her materials from a facility run by the Berlin City Mission that collects clothing for the needy and sells everything that is not passed on by the kilo. She finds printed T-shirts, silk scarves, wool, and nylon pieces, and transforms them into new silhouettes that range from bodycon to bulky. Her signature ruched silk dresses and tops and reconstructed jersey pieces, often decorated with long ribbons, were joined this season by trompe l’œil jeans made of ecologically printed sustainable denim, as well as various twisted suit looks that she described as “a symbol of the twisted corporate ideals in our modern world.” The clothes looked like a contemporary shell for the challenges of our digital world.
