Free Again, and It Shows

Berlin Fashion Week moves at a pace that makes considered opinions difficult—show to show, party to coffee to another party, old faces everywhere and new ones turning up at corners you weren’t expecting. What keeps it from feeling like pure industry machinery is that Berlin designers tend to mean what they make. The city is too contrary for spectacle without substance.

Kilian Kerner, a Berlin-based designer who spent years building a loyal audience before his label folded under financial pressure, returned this week after three years away, showing a new collection under the name KXXK to a sold-out house. The collection, called Großstadtleben—city life—ran from oversized streetwear through structured urban tailoring, all of it held together by styling that felt unified without being rigid. Lots of colour, angular faces on the models, clothes that looked like they could survive actual use. The standout pieces were the text-bearing ones: oversized hoodies and metal-lettered coats carrying blunt provocations—I’m not a racist and I don’t even have to be smart for that—the kind of statement that works better sewn onto a garment than posted anywhere online.

Kerner said afterward that working without commercial constraints felt like going back to the beginning. It felt a bit like my early days, he said, and the collection carried that looseness. Berlin may never become a fashion capital in the industry sense, and I’m not sure it should want to. But a show like this one—specific, loud, genuinely convinced of itself—makes the question feel beside the point.