Fashion x Craft: Echoes of Tomorrow

In the organizer's words:

The exhibition shows how five young designers translate traditional craftsmanship into contemporary fashion: The exhibition presents elaborate fashion designs, provides insights into their creation process and encourages the understanding and continuation of craftsmanship as an intergenerational dialog.

Analog arts in digital times

Can craftsmanship be understood as an exchange of experiences across generations? Can the dialog about a completely analog good be continued in digital times? How will we remember traditional techniques - and can we succeed in preserving them in the future? Five young fashion designers have been grappling with these questions for months.

"We imagined a universe in which this memory takes shape as nostalgia - like a reminiscence in which it is impossible to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined," say Aleksander Kudrischow, Laura De Sousa, Lennart Bohle, Jon Liesenfeld and Melanie Parzenczewki from V-Collective. "In this world, craftsmanship reappears in new forms: Some details remain vivid, others blur, dissolve and merge into a hybrid, futuristic vision of craftsmanship."

The collection "Echoes of Tomorrow", which will be on display in the rooms of the Gemäldegalerie, is based on the thinking and handiwork of the five creatives. The exhibition invites visitors to explore traditional techniques, get to know their contemporary reinterpretations and think about the fashion of the future.

A year of experimentation and creation

The V-Collective is made up of participants in the Fashion x Craft initiative: The project of the industry association Fashion Council Germany in cooperation with eBay Germany and The King's Foundation offers young fashion and textile designers a tailor-made support program that focuses equally on topics of sustainability, craftsmanship and innovation. During residencies at the Good Garment Collective in Berlin and a King's Foundation site in Highgrove, England, participants are introduced to artisanal processes that go beyond the boundaries of traditional fashion and textile production in wide-ranging workshops and intensive mentoring programs.

This year's edition of the initiative gave rise to the V-Collective and its 24-piece fashion collection: It is based on the craftsmanship skills taught to the participants during the project year, including natural dyeing techniques, weaving and lace-making, as well as non-fashion techniques such as basket weaving, metalwork and woodwork. The designs were made from deadstock materials - unused fabrics and fibers from major companies provided by eBay Germany and the deadstock platform Zerow.

Raw studio wall in an institutional space

The garments from the collection are exhibited in the form of a stage installation. The rooms of the picture gallery play an important role in the staging concept: the museum-like perfection of the exhibition space - which the creative director of the traditional house of Dior, Jonathan Anderson, recently described as one of the most beautiful museum rooms in the world - is contrasted by the V-Collective show in the rear part of the Wandelhalle with a partly rough, raw wall design with plaster and paint residues. Complemented by fabric hangings, collages and sketches, the impression of a studio wall is created, which atmospherically transfers the collection's development process into the institutional space of the picture gallery and makes it comprehensible there.

Opening as part of Fashion Week

The exhibition will be officially opened as part of Berlin Fashion Week. At the same time, the exhibition "Gallery Looks. Fashion Stagings in the Picture Gallery" - an impressive encounter between art of the past and contemporary fashion in design, photography, film and haute couture. From February 3 to 22, 2026, Der Berliner Salon will also be showing fashion designs by young designers in dialog with the Gemäldegalerie's permanent exhibition.

A special exhibition of the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Price information:

Admission to the Picture Gallery: €14.00, concessions €7.00; free admission for children and young people up to and including the age of 18.