At the start of their SS26 show, GmbH designers Benjamin A Huseby and Serhat Işık observed a 58-second silence, honouring each Palestinian man, woman and child killed in Gaza. Announced over speakers in the Palais am Funkturm, every thousandth of a second denoted a single life lost, an acknowledgement that brought the unfathomable scale of loss into heart-aching clarity. Not that Huseby and Işık needed reminding of that violence, though: show notes written by the designers told guests that “this is the fourth season we have tried to create in the shadows of what a United Nations Special Committee, Amnesty International and many of the world’s most imminent experts in the field has defined as a genocide.”

Despite that, the collection itself was not about the violence. “It’s a collection that reflects a process of working and living through a time defined by the most abject forms of horror and moral collapse and trying to come out the other side still human,” continued the show notes.

As Bernard Herrmann’s Cape Fear score bellowed through the auditorium, models appeared first in tuxedo jackets and pyjama shorts, then diaphanous blouses with bat-wing sleeves, tucked into cotton striped boxers and riding boots on foot. Next came vests with imitation euro notes pinned all over them, cutout denim jeans and two ‘Masallah’ slogan t-shirts in jet black and taupe. Elsewhere in the collection, the design duo expanded on the mourning veils of last season with two black and white scarves that completely covered their models’ faces, plus two looks towards the end of the collection – donuts of draped fabric wrapped around their models’ shoulders – evoked the ‘Revenge neckline’ GmbH is known to revisit.

You might’ve noticed there was an air of childlike wonder in the collection – especially in the bermuda shorts and dreamy fabrics – and that’s because, this season, the designers found solace in childhood. After the show had ended, Huseby and Işık retired to the building’s outside patio, where they revealed that they had revisited family memories on old VHS tapes, in an attempt to extract the joy from that time in their lives. “We carved those memories out and we leaned on those memories,” said Işık after the show. “There’s so much love that carried us through this collection.”

But, naturally, from childhood comes the idea of innocence, another prevalent theme that was explored while making this collection. “We were thinking a lot about the idea of innocence,” said Huseby, in the garden. “What that means, who gets to be innocent, who decides who’s innocent,” he continued, contemplatively. “Because, a lot of the time, brown and Black men are never innocent.”

Scroll through the gallery above for GmbH’s SS26 collection