For the hour or I spent in ’s Einstein Unter den Linden café, I bore witness to the future of fashion—or, perhaps more accurately, future of it. This city has a tendency to do that, not least because it was Berlin Fashion Week, which was terrific, with a ton of febrile, forward-thinking, and youthful creative energy. (Kudos to those who showed, btw.
) That said, the two people sitting in front of me who are helping to power this forward propulsion—Luis Dobbelgarten, the founder of the label NO/FAITH STUDIOS, and his creative co-conspirator, women’s designer, and best friend Moritz (Mo) Himmler—are young by even Berlin’s standards: Both and Mo are a mere 24. (The third member of NO/FAITH STUDIOS—Luis’s brother, Leon, who handles business and logistics —is, at 25, the elder statesman of the group.) Just to make you feel even more inadequate (or is that just feeling this way?): Dobbelgarten first set up a rudimentary version of his label when he was 13.
doesn’t even begin to cover it. But let’s back up for a minute, and explain how I came to be here. This is going to sound horribly namedrop-y—ugh, sorry—but at the this past February I was sitting beside the photographer Inez Van Lamsweerde, with whom I chatted about new labels.
When she mentioned that her son, Charles Matadin, was obsessed with NO/FAITH STUDIOS, it elicited a look of blank incomprehension from me. A quick Google search later, though, made clear the appeal: The label, which really took .
