In lieu of a film of their fashion show, this season GmbH used the official Paris digital platform—and Vogue Runway—to post a video of someone else’s. This was in the form of a short film entitled “Season of Migration to the North” by artist Lars Laumann. It begins in Khartoum in 2010 and follows the narrated journals of Eddie Esmail as he plans to stage a fashion show. This leads to his prosecution for homosexuality, his eventual emigration from Sudan to Norway, his successful application for asylum, and then his experiences of “conforming to” society in Oslo—where he finds professional success but experiences racial and religious discrimination from within the gay community. This is recounted in blank-screen stanzas around which we see footage of that fateful original show (which looked fun).
Over an (inevitable) Zoom from Berlin, the designers Benjamin Alexander Huseby and Serhat Isik explained the reasons for handing their platform over to Laumann’s take on Esmail’s story. Number one was that its exposure of the tangled web of prejudices, both racial and sexuality-based, that immigrants often experience bears close creative kinship to the position of GmbH and its two designers, whose family backgrounds include Norway, Pakistan, Turkey, and Germany. Number two was that they were both struck down pretty hard earlier in the year with COVID-19, and were out of action for four weeks.
Given that, it’s incredibly impressive that this collection came to be. It is, said Huseby, an “edited selection of our most familiar styles limited to the materials we had available,” but there was no qualifer or caveat attached. As Isik observed. “It grew from a very pragmatic point of question which was ‘How do we develop the collection in the first place?’ The way we went forward was not unfamiliar to us because we started making our first collections from deadstock material. And having those restrictions allowed us to be very focused.”
That focus led to another significant thought, he added: “Because we had to download things in the studio, and the future is a little bit uncertain, we came to a realization: If we take growth out of the equation as the factor that defines our success, then we just have so much more freedom—and the process becomes much more sustainable because constant growth is completely not sustainable.” GmbH is the acronym for Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, the most common corporate structure in Germany. Its founders appear to have struck on a formula for virtuous industrial nirvana.
