Andrej Gronau needed a holiday; like, really needed a holiday. Yet no break was in sight, and the young designer, who’s living between London and Berlin—nomading, as someone put it to him backstage after his show—didn’t get much sympathy when he mentioned it to his family. “Why do you have to go on vacation?” one of them said to him, he recalled, laughing. “Why don’t you find a way to go on vacation at home?” That got Gronau thinking about the place where he’d be spending that sojourn, his boyfriend’s garden, and how a garden is a microcosm of the world, with flora from all around the globe; that it’s nature designed and manipulated to look like…nature, and that gardening can be an act of metamorphosis. Yet that wasn’t enough. He then started to think about the depth and intensity of painter Francis Bacon’s color palette; reflective of natural life, yet somehow also an intensely, powerfully rendered version of it.
Four shows in with Berlin Fashion Week and one thing has become apparent about Gronau: He is for sure a thinker, someone who lives for the transference of conceptual ideas into clothing, but thankfully, he’s also a doer, which means said ideas are assimilated in such a way that they don’t feel overwrought or overworked, but become cool, interesting clothes. You don’t need to know one iota of any of the spring collection’s backstory to appreciate, maybe even love, some of its looks; the coats and tees in glorious shades of raspberry and sunshine yellow metallicized leather, screen-printed with abstracted blooms, say, or the bizarrely folkloric gathered skirts, printed with yet more blooms and prancing cats, or the elongated sweaters, color-blocked in brown, black, and teal, or emerald, black, and shell pink, the idea being that the knit is…what exactly? A top metamorphosing into a dress…or vice versa.
Gronau does great knits. He’s also an excellent colorist. There’s a terrific and instinctive charm at work here, and Gronau’s decision to put all of the designing into approachable, minimalistic, slightly 1960s-inflected shapes for all genders, is a shrewd one, because he knows that’s the way to make all the cerebral stuff actually come to life. “The last collection, fall 2026, was the turning point,” he said, “because I realized I love color, and I love expressive references; what I was doing before was maybe too cute and calm.” To commemorate the place he finds himself in workwise, a gratitude that he’s getting to do what he wants, and has the support of people to do it, he printed up a zine to accompany the collection, which breaks down all the thoughts and impulses that went into it, with behind-the-scenes photo imagery and inspirational images. It feels honest, and it feels heartfelt, just like his clothes.
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