GmbH is a fashion brand set up in 2016, the project of Benjamin Alexander Huseby, a Norwegian-Pakistani fashion photographer and artist, and Serhat Işık, a Turkish-German fashion designer. Their Autumn/Winter 2024 show featured models wearing kufi hats, niqabs and keffiyeh jackets, and opened with a heartfelt ten-minute speech from Huseby and Işık calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, an intervention that lasted as long as the runway presentation itself. In light of the German crackdown on Palestinian activism and the fashion industry’s silence on the ongoing genocide, it was an act of considerable bravery.

TANK You’ve always spoken out against injustice in marginalised communities, and in your January show, you took a vocal stance on Gaza at a moment when the situation was very fraught. Your speech went viral. Did you have blowback or a swelling of support?

Benjamin A Huseby  For me, the response was overwhelmingly good. As designers, we’ve been very outspoken about Palestine for years already. Other designers talking about Palestine for the first time may have experienced a sharper divide in their community: we’d already done that purge years ago. There might be situations we’re left out of – where people don’t review you or you get ghosted or shadow-banned. A review of our show was just unceremoniously deleted from Women’s Wear Daily. It’s really hard to know the effect it will have in the long term, but in terms of the general audience, it was positive, and a lot of people came to the brand through it.

Serhat Işık  It felt like a collective sigh, at least for people working in the industry. For a couple of people that I spoke to, they’d been waiting for us to say something more explicit.

TANK How do you feel about using fashion as a political platform? Do you feel like you’re able to convert people who want to hear political stances through the medium of clothes?

BAH I think it’s very difficult to limit oneself to be purely a political brand. We are designers first and foremost, and our work is so interconnected with our lives. We’re politically and socially conscious in how we live our lives, and that seeps into our work – it’s very hard for us to separate those things. What we’ve always liked about fashion as a platform to talk about social injustice or other political topics is its immediacy. It is about dealing with desire, beauty, surface. We’re looking to do it with many different layers: we’re not like a brand that just puts slogans on T-shirts. For instance, when we started, we put a lot of brown and Arab men on the runway, which wasn’t normal in Paris at the time. We were told that our casting was aggressive. A lot of our politics have come about through decolonising our minds, or letting go of self-criticism, the things you grew up being told not to be proud of. We’re always questioning and exploring how to do these things.

TANK You talk about surface and beauty, and using easily identifiable symbols like the keffiyeh is a way of portraying beauty in something that has historically been seen as challenging. Does that limit your creativity when you want to be more complex about things?

SI I don’t find it limiting at all. If anything, we enjoy that tension. I think our work is often about tension: between sex and modesty, religion and queerness, all those things. Most of the time, in our lived experience, we have been met with resistance. We’re used to it, and it’s what inspires us. We’re not very strategic. The brand has always been about authentically, maybe even selfishly, representing our thoughts, ourselves and our community. That’s probably part of the success of GmbH: those things people thought were a risk for us to take are exactly what makes us us.

TANK Another layer for you guys is that you’re living in Berlin. Germany has been particularly brutal in its anti-Palestine stance, while at the same time, Berlin is equated with so much incredible freedom. If you’re saying each collection is a result of what you’re feeling, how can you not have the angriest, darkest collection coming out soon?

SI The largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe lives in Neukölln in Berlin. Sonnenallee, where we live and which has a large Arab population, has become criminalised. If you want to go to your house or flat, they check your bags. Going back to how every collection reflects what we feel, of course we’re sad and devastated every day but I don’t feel like I’m in mourning yet. I think we’re very much in fight mode still, maybe because there’s no ceasefire yet and every day we’re still seeing images emerging from Gaza. This collection is about resistance through just existing, but also resistance through actual resistance, about the people that we know who are resisting here. In some ways, it’s also a celebration of just staging something together. The collection is titled “Resistance Through Rituals”, and I think that aspect is important for us.

BAH The show and the collection are a celebration of the community and what we stand for. In the particularly repressive environment in Germany at the moment, I think it’s more important than ever to show the beauty of our community and to give it a platform. I think we’ve always been about confronting the West with our culture, from our first proper show in Berlin, which we called “My Beauty Offends You”. Now more than ever, this diverse, beautiful community that we are living in is experiencing so much repression and so much criminalisation. We know people in all kinds of different levels of activism, and it’s just trying to find a moment where we can come together.

SI It’s what keeps us sane.  .