When you’re a designer, you never know when inspiration might strike. Take Johann Ehrhardt of Haderlump, for instance. Little did he realize that when he agreed to help a friend of his move to Leberstraße 65 in the Schöneberg neighborhood of Berlin that his fall 2026 collection would fall into place. Berlin-wise, it’s a pretty iconic address: the birthplace of Marlene Dietrich. “I stood in front of the building, and thought, ‘This is awesome,’” recalled Ehrhardt. “I went all over the house taking pictures. And then I thought about how I have so many friends who are actors and dancers, and I started to think about how I wanted to cast them for this show.”
Which explains why he is saying all this backstage at the Wintergarten Variete theatre, another location made iconic by Dietrich, who performed there in the Berlin of the 1920s, a time when the city, the country, and indeed the world, was dancing on the edge of a volcano. So, for fall 2026 then, Dietrich—androgynous, tailored, glamorous—is in there, to some greater or lesser degree: In the way the tailoring juts at the shoulder, nips at the waist, and flows across the legs, as much as the swagger of the dramatic, and dramatically long, coats—and all of it in the end modeled by, yes, actors and dancers and, it so happens, about four or five of the staff of the theater itself. (To underscore the performance feel of the night, Ehrhardt asked musician John Carlsson to perform a literal curtain raiser soundtrack, and he gave a dreamy, ambient mix of acoustic grand piano and electronic beats.)
Yet really what was on Ehrhardt’s mind was the desire to make Haderlump a little more adult, less street; strike a different note, hit a new beat. “We had to try something different,” he said, “because otherwise, it can get boring: the same styles, the same silhouettes. And, we have a new store here in Berlin that opened in December, and that made me want to make everything with a clean aesthetic; that we can invest in our idea of tailoring.”
Truth be told, it feels like Ehrhardt has been edging from grit to glamour for some time now, but this collection definitely struck a more grown-up note, not least of all because he’d swapped the usual urban sturm und drang for the red velveted cosseting of the theater. But it was also all there in his clothes, from the ever so slightly distressed leather outerwear which still exuded polish, to the pinstriped suiting (v. Marlene) whose lines morphed and twisted across the body, to the lace peeking out of so many of the men’s looks, while the women shimmered and shined in diamonds.
