Esther Perbandt (Q3067)

Esther Perbandt’s show might go down as the least conventional of Berlin Fashion Week. For Fall ’17, the designer returned to the historic Volksbühne theater, which boasts a rich history ranging from ’20s film stars to Buster Keaton and Dada. She cast a similarly diverse group of models and friends, including none other than Veruschka—also known as Vera von Lehndorff, Germany’s first supermodel. Von Lehndorff closed the show in a signature Perbandt look—all-black, military-inspired—and kissed the designer before taking her final bow.This was more of a performance-art piece than your standard runway outing. Perbandt enlisted music producer Sven Helbig and a string quartet for a live soundtrack; Zoran Bihac designed a moving set of broken pillars and walls; and, somewhat inexplicably, there was also a guy on stilts. Models walked out amid the chaos in variations of Perbandt’s signature androgynous look, but with a few noteworthy changes. She’s no longer the only designer who’s blurring gender lines, after all, so she experimented with seductive cutouts, abbreviated hems, and plunging necklines. The guys showed some skin, too, with sliced-up suiting and robe coats worn open over bare, tattooed chests.Perhaps the line-up could have used a bit of editing—some of the looks felt too similar—but it ended memorably. For the finale, the models climbed up onto the makeshift walls and the stage began to spin—slowly revealing what was happening behind the scenes the entire time. A masked artist was painting the walls with giant letters that spelledEmpört Euch, which translates toBe indignantin English. It wasn’t a difficult message to parse; on the heels of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, designers and others within the fashion community have been particularly vocal about their fears of a closed-off, intolerant society. You can expect that to become an important theme in the menswear, couture, and ready-to-wear collections to come.