“I THINK all of them are ready for the club,” replied Marie Lueder in her studio, a few days before her London Fashion Week presentation. Earlier this month, the German designer unveiled her autumn-winter 2025 collection, titled The Shell, in Berlin in the classic runway format, but decided to also add a show in her new hometown. The reasoning? A clever decision to expand her audience and present her ideas in a new light – quite literally.
“I felt this internal split of being German and living in London. Then there’s this interesting direction in Berlin where people are super excited and super naïve. In London, people are really hungry,” she replies, outlining the differences. “London is very real and very inspiring, its got the biggest judges for me. In Berlin, it’s more like a playground where I can be artistic”.
Transforming a space through the eyes of set designer Tom Schneider, a pulsating club-like setting was created. Techno, strobe lights and energy filled up the space, purposefully dissolving the space of any conventional boundaries, taking away the distance between audience and performer. The result was a fluid landscape, one which the designer seeks heavy inspiration from as her designs are never categorised for him or her, rather for them.
This season in particular stemmed from her summer travels to Marseille and Scotland, where she felt like her rest improved her mental wellbeing. “I felt like I gained some of my confidence back as I was very much in the moment again,” explains Lueder. Her time up north, in contrast, had her return to her constant threaded inspiration of the medieval times, visiting castles and stately homes to digest the rich tapestries, heavy curtains and hand-shaped antique furniture.
Naturally, taking this all in and reconfiguring its meaning through a contemporary and slightly dystopian lens, she blurred the lines between sophistication and individualism; masculinity and femininity; and innovation and tradition. The palette was purposefully muted and washed out: “The overall theme was as if the light was sucked out of the world, so its quite grey. Then we introduced pockets of colour, but they were still muted”.
Silhouettes were both baggy and very fitted, with female identifying pieces reflecting more of the latter, like the wrap skirt and tight cycling-esque two piece, and larger pieces like the hoodies and fur coats offering an ability to let the clothes blur your figure.
While AW25 was punctuated with contrasts that somehow managed to all align into one meaning, it was Lueder’s white tank with the phrase ‘Men are so back’ that caused people to bombard Instagram with images of the garment. The point wasn’t to cause a stir online but rather reflect her opinion of the times we are living in – fashion is, after-all meant to be a zeitgeist.
“What I wanted to address were things that I fear, like thinking about a certain type of masculinity that I fear and the return to it,” explains the designer, also stating there were specific notions of domestic horror in the collection.
“There is a horror when you’re in front of the TV right now and watching the news so I think this is the level of communication I can talk from, this is my point of view as a female business owner and as a women myself in February 2024. I am scared of the election in Germany next week, Donald Trump and many other things”.
With history not only translated into the seams and patterns of Lueder’s brand identity, it is a simple slogan that helped tie the collection firmly into the present day. Identity doesn’t have to be so black and white, and exploration doesn’t need to be honed into a single realm. In the flashing lights of her presentation, I think everyone was able to find a part of themselves that they had left on the dancefloor.
by Imogen Clark