Andrej Gronau needed a holiday; like, really needed a holiday. Yet no break was in sight, and the young designer, who\u2019s living between London and Berlin\u2014nomading, as someone put it to him backstage after his show\u2014didn\u2019t get much sympathy when he mentioned it to his family. \u201cWhy do you have to go on vacation?\u201d one of them said to him, he recalled, laughing. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you find a way to go on vacation at home?\u201d That got Gronau thinking about the place where he\u2019d be spending that sojourn, his boyfriend\u2019s garden, and how a garden is a microcosm of the world, with flora from all around the globe; that it\u2019s nature designed and manipulated to look like\u2026nature, and that gardening can be an act of metamorphosis. Yet that wasn\u2019t enough. He then started to think about the depth and intensity of painter Francis Bacon\u2019s color palette; reflective of natural life, yet somehow also an intensely, powerfully rendered version of it.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s also a doer, which means said ideas are assimilated in such a way that they don\u2019t feel overwrought or overworked, but become cool, interesting clothes. You don\u2019t need to know one iota of any of the spring collection\u2019s 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\u2026what exactly? A top metamorphosing into a dress\u2026or vice versa.<\/p>\n
Gronau does great knits. He\u2019s also an excellent colorist. There\u2019s a terrific and instinctive charm at work here, and Gronau\u2019s 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\u2019s the way to make all the cerebral stuff actually come to life. \u201cThe last collection, fall 2026, was the turning point,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause I realized I love color, and I love expressive references; what I was doing before was maybe too cute and calm.\u201d To commemorate the place he finds himself in workwise, a gratitude that he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andrej Gronau needed a holiday; like, really needed a holiday. Yet no break was in sight, and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[40607,18,40542,40544,40543],"class_list":["post-48960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-andrej-gronau","tag-berlin","tag-berlin-spring-2027","tag-runway","tag-runway_review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}