Column #2 – S/S26 Berlin Fashion Week – Rewritten by PLATTE

They said the city was too scattered, too cool to commit. And yet, this Berlin Fashion Week felt strangely focused – like something or someone had managed to hold the chaos in place just long enough for meaning to emerge. At the centre of it all: PLATTE.Berlin. Not just a location, but a force – quietly (and not so quietly) shaping the narrative through five events that weren’t just scheduled, but choreographed into PLATTE Fashion Week.

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It began with a siren. Clara Colette Miramon’s open-air show Care, which marked the official kickoff of Berlin Fashion Week, was staged directly on Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße with the Volksbühne looming behind. The setting didn’t ask for attention – it interrupted the city’s rhythm and demanded it. Suddenly, an ambulance arrived, and the models disembarked from it. Some in nurse caps, others draped in pieces that spoke of invisible labour, tenderness, exhaustion. This was not fashion as escape, but as confrontation —a poetic, raw, and unflinching tribute to the everyday acts of care that too often go unseen, especially when performed by women.

Meanwhile, over a full month and directly at the PLATTE store, the fifth edition of the Next Gen Pop-Up began carving out a slower, more grounded rhythm. From June 30 to July 31, five designers – Autel, Steigleder, J.A.I.W, Dear Diary, and Carolin Dieler – have been given not just space, but time. The chance to present, test, and sell their work directly inside PLATTE.Berlin, surrounded by an audience that listens. This year, for the first time, the Pop-Up was supported by an international jury and expanded through a new collaboration with FABRIC Hamburg. The Next Gen Pop-Up embodies the quiet radical act of presence – and the belief that this is what the future of fashion might look like: porous, process-driven, and personal.

If the Next Gen Pop-Up cracked the surface, the Berlin Curated Showroom pulled us in deeper. Developed with Christiane Arp and her team, this new format became one of the week’s most resonant statements. Fourteen fashion graduates presented not just looks, but perspectives – each one framed inside a dense, atmospheric installation by Sven Marquardt, whose fog-filled visuals lent the room a kind of intimate gravity. It didn’t feel like a showroom. It felt like standing inside a collective thought.

Between grand columns and fading departure boards, the PLATTE x LETTE Show reclaimed the monumental entrance hall of Tempelhof Airport – a place of movement and discovery, once for travellers and now for the designers and models. Here, the strongest graduates from the past four years revealed collections that moved between the conceptual and the wearable, between softness and confrontation. From Greta Klingel to Rosalba Faroqhi, each look carried its vocabulary – one stitched from references to subcultures, craft traditions, gender fluidity, and quiet rebellion.

And then came nightfall. Not as an ending, but as a release. The Official Closing Party at Ayoka Club was everything it needed to be – chaotic, beautiful, bold. No velvet rope, just a floor full of people who had given something to the week and were ready to give a little more. You didn’t always know what moment you were in. Only that it mattered. I stood in the crowd, watching how the week unravelled itself one last time.

Over the week, of course, there was noise. Whispered gossip in half-lit backrooms, outfits made to be photographed, an overdose of formats all trying to matter. But beneath the spectacle, something stuck. A sense that even in its messiest, most self-conscious moments, Berlin Fashion Week reveals a more relevant city than ever, standing not for polish, but for the purpose of the Next Generation of Fashion.