GmbH Winter/Spring 24 Collection "UNTITLED NATIONS"

As fashion designers we are normally left to express our thoughts through clothing and leave the rest to the imagination. But we live in dangerous times, where the precision of words is needed.

For the last 6 years GmbH has been about showing the beauty of our heritage, or simply put: show our humanity, and in various ways say that we, as children of Muslim immigrants in Europe, are not terrorists. The demonisation of Muslims, which in our own experience escalated after 9/11, has brought disproportionate attention to how Muslims look. But itÊs the centuries of dehumanising orientalist tropes that have led us to the deadliest of suffering.

As so many others we have had many sleepless nights after witnessing the most violent nightmarish images we have ever seen, which for the first time are livestreamed into our phones. As a way of dealing with these intense emotions, helplessness, and the limits of social media, we have gathered with allies in meetings, and as a kind of collective therapy demonstrated almost weekly in the streets of Berlin, Paris, and London. We have called for a ceasefire now, release of all hostages, a free Palestine, and an end to the occupation. All demands we think should be uncontroversial.

As the far right - and actual Nazis and fascists are once again gaining power across Europe, and many other parts of the world, antisemitism and Islamophobia rising too.

How convenient, then, to distract us to make us believe there is really a struggle between two already marginalised people, when in fact the struggle is rather between power and justice, exclusionary nationalism and true universal humanity, oppression and freedom.

In Germany, where we live, we have seen in the last months dozens of cancelations of artists, writers, and musicians for not aligning with German state policy. The majority of those cancelled are Palestinian, Jewish, Black or Brown. We should all be terrified, when Germany starts again silencing Jews and other dissenting voices.

UNTITLED NATIONS is a statement against nationalism. - Benjamin & Serhat

The show features both pieces from the WINTER 2024 and SPRING 2024 collections.

The keffiyehs were provided by SEP. Every SEP piece is embroidered by hand in the Jerash "Gaza" refugee camp in Jordan. The SEP Artists are Palestinian and Syrian refugees and each piece they create has a purpose: to tell their story, to celebrate and preserve their heritage, while waiting for a political solution to their displacement.