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PARIS, France — GmbH designers Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Isik have a good thing going. Like many of the young, skirt-just-outside-the-establishment brands that started up over the past few years, the Berlin-based designers have a penchant for dead-stock fabrics, club clothes and irony. (Their name, a generic German term for a company, equivalent to an LLC in America-speak, is intentionally reductive.)
What distinguishes GmbH is superior fit and technique. While Huseby and Isik have upgraded their fabrics over the years — they said they take "painstaking" measures to source Italian eco-friendly materials — what distinguishes the label is that they know how to make a pair of jeans hug the rear, or a thrice-belted blazer perfectly whittle the waist.
There is no awkward teenager hiding in these wares. Even a visual motif like the evil eye, overused and overwrought in fashion, develops ever so nicely, starting with a single motif on a white tank and blooming into a richly embroidered mesh tapestry. "It's meant to be a protective talisman," Huseby said backstage.
And while GmbH technically started in menswear, there’s something decidedly feminine about the collection in its entirety, no matter which sex is wearing what piece. Let this go down as the season when gender really did become irrelevant on the catwalk, with labels like GmbH leading. Even their ocean-blue gown, seamed beautifully with gentle waves of ruffles, doesn’t feel like it should be worn solely by a man or a woman. That’s modernity.
