Berlin Fashion Week FW26: The Season’s Standouts

The fifth edition of Intervention – the platform curated by Reference Studios as part of Berlin Fashion Week — became the stage for DAGGER’s debut. Founded by Luke Rainey, the brand had already built a strong following and is currently stocked at Dover Street Market Paris. With this presentation, however, DAGGER took a decisive next step. With the Fall/Winter 2026 collection Play Hard, it tells a deeply personal story about heritage, youth, and growing up with limited means. Luke Rainey draws on memories of his childhood in the Northern Irish coastal town of Portrush, abandoned arcades, harsh winter evenings, and skateboarding as a form of escape, self-expression, and community all at once. That atmosphere runs through the collection. The looks feel deliberately raw, and worn. Customized Vans and reimagined Eastpaks are not nostalgic references, but emotional anchors for identity, belonging, and resilience. Play Hard is not about perfection, but about the courage to turn scarcity into creativity and to draw strength from community. Fashion becomes lived memory.

With Overtime, SIA ARNIKA moves her collection into the hours after work, when order begins to crumble and the unpredictable slips through. The collection plays with the familiar space of the office, where strictness and professional attitude slowly lose their hold as the day ends. Classic workwear references are fragmented, as if uniforms had loosened themselves in the transition to night. Sharp tailoring meets flowing jerseys, mesh, and tension-filled layering that both shape and release the body. Overtime captures exhaustion and sweet release in an office building in Mitte. The moment when functioning stops and feeling begins. SIA ARNIKA refines her signature approach, using fashion as an emotional space to let go.

With their latest collection as part of Intervention, GmbH once again positions fashion as both a political seismograph and an emotional outlet. The starting point is the unsettling concept of “peace anxiety,” exposing the absurd logic of a system that benefits from ongoing conflict and sees peace as an economic threat. The label channels this anger, grief, and speechlessness into a collection that moves between protest and poetry. Inspired by Berlin’s early eighties industrial and synth scene, and bands like DAF, GmbH evokes a time when the city still carried radical counterculture and utopian promise. Clothing becomes a code, a marker of belonging and resistance in a world shaped by fear, power abuse, and violence. Doppelgänger reads both as a warning and a memory, an attempt to find beauty in the dark without softening the brutality of reality.

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #100

REALITY IS NO OBSTACLE

refuse to obey

refuse to die

refuse to sleep

refuse to turn away

refuse to close your eyes

refuse to shut your ears

refuse silence when you can still sing

refuse discourse in lieu of embracement come to

no end that is not

a beginning

(Diane Di Prima, 1971)

LOU DE BÉTOLY’s new collection revolves around the principle of repetition, exploring how working persistently with the same materials can reveal entirely new aesthetic possibilities. Vintage lingerie, lace, knitwear, and leather, all signature elements of the brand, are deconstructed, recombined, and layered until seemingly outdated fabrics emerge as fragile, breathtaking silhouettes. Against a restrained color palette, the focus is entirely on craft. With this collection, LOU DE BÉTOLY stays true to her signature approach, telling stories of memory, using limitation as a creative force, and showing how even the most familiar materials can be reinvented into new aesthetic spaces.

SF1OG presented their Fall/Winter 2026 collection as a deep exploration of the invisible within the visible. The collection centers on hiding and revealing, asking who we are when no one is watching and what we conceal when we think we are unseen. This introspective question runs through the choice of materials, silhouettes, and narrative details. Flickering paparazzi shots from the late 2000s, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, and Adam Sandler caught in moments of exhaustion and vulnerability meet the strict codes of Victorian mourning attire, where emotion was both displayed and protected. This tension between exposure and concealment is reflected in the fabrics and layering, with antique linens, cashmere, leather, velvet, and silk worn imperfectly, like memories on the body.

KASIA KUCHARSKA’s F/W26 collection emerged from a state of extremes. Weeks and months of overwhelming love, frustration, and inner tension form the emotional starting point. Motherhood. A complex space between strength and vulnerability. Nostalgia plays a central role, with fragmented memories of childhood, and cinematic figures, reinterpreted through full-latex looks. In contrast, the shirt appears as a recurring element of structure. Here translated into modular, quickly adjustable forms. The collection speaks to a woman in constant motion, juggling multiple roles, whose focus is scattered and whose labor often goes unseen.

Rarely has a show left its audience so surprised and genuinely delighted. For Berlin Fashion Week, RICHERT BEIL invited guests into an intimate dinner setting. The runway unfolded like a four-course menu, with waiters dressed in the brand’s looks serving dishes by CHEHUB between the model walks. The finale was both unsettling and unforgettable: guests were presented with a real ostrich egg, from which they pulled out a black men’s lace underpants. The entire experience felt meditative yet charged with tension, demonstrating the designers’ courage – the courage to experiment, to demand patience from the audience, and to sustain anticipation without spectacle. Titled Landei, the AW26 collection considers fashion as a long-term commitment, shaped by distance, craftsmanship, and clarity of intent, resisting systems driven by speed, scale, and constant visibility. Thoroughly authentic, it marked one of the highlights of Berlin Fashion Week.

Also worth highlighting is Berlin Curated, the FCG’s support program for emerging talent. At BFW it gave fashion students a stage to showcase their ideas, attend workshops, and level up their brands. At the FCG AW26 Showroom, designers like House of Akir, Stefan Uhr, Lotta Strobauch, and Shahnoz Bakhtiyorova shared current and past work, offered insights into their creative process, and connected directly with industry professionals. With the chance to be part of the Berlin Curated Runway Show this summer, the program is all about giving the designers of tomorrow the visibility and support they deserve.