Save this story Save Story Save this story The designers Paulina Munzing and Gent Berbatovci previewed their spring 2027 behind Grand Export collection this summer during Berlin Fashion Week in an heavenly 19th century apartment in the city’s Charlottenburg neighborhood, the kind of place that makes you reconsider your housing choices. The creative (and life) partners specialize in upcycled primary-bright shell tracksuits turned into graphic dresses, silvery-gray sculpted skirts made from deadstock leather, and classic white athletic tanks that cleave to the body but whose straps do somersaults, twisting and turning around the shoulders because of the inner wiring in them.
Berlin provided Munzing and Berbatovci with their label’s name. “There’s a street, Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße, which is full of these import and export shops,” Munzing says. “They sell everything—clothing, children’s stuff, even car tyres—and we like that Grand Export feels…unidentifiable, that our brand has the same character as those shops in a way. We want to produce post-heritage luxury, but when you hear the name, it could mean anything.” By post-heritage luxury, they mean elevating whatever they find and making it work but also making it better; the patina of age, and the presence of a lived life, is more than a bonus to them—it’s vital.
One of the upcycled primary-bright shell tracksuits turned into graphic dresses.
That was evident during Paris Fashion Week, as they unveiled the complete collection, dubbed Trophies. There were chunky red wool zip-neck sweaters that can be worn upside down (turning them that way offers a far more fitted waistline), short black leather dresses with silky bras peeking out, and repurposed 1970s-era brown shearling coats transformed into curvaceous jackets which, like the knitwear, have a cropped, whittled waist. The venue this time round was an equally airy, heavenly, pale-toned, 19 th century apartment in Paris’s 9eme arrondissement, a bread roll’s throw away from the original Rose Bakery.
There are two things to know about Grand Export. One, they clearly have exquisite taste in apartments, no doubt informed by how they see beauty in the past. And two, their label, while destined for global relevance, still lives and breathes Berlin, a city whose fashion has become rightly renowned for its experimentalism, environmentalism, and laudable disinclination to do things just because that’s how the industry has always done them in the past. Contrary to popular belief, there is no dark, doomy, Goth-y Berlin ‘look’; instead it’s where aesthetic diversity is united by mindset and sense of purpose. In Munzing and Berbatovci’s case, their city is a springboard to say something about fashion that they want to resonate far beyond its borders.
That was evident during Paris Fashion Week, as they unveiled the complete collection, dubbed Trophies.
Their philosophy is in no small part down to the fact that Grand Export is a fusion of their two different design backgrounds. Munzing, who’s from Berlin, studied at the London College of Fashion before working for Mugler in Paris then heading to Milan for Trussardi; Berbatovci, for his part, is a product designer who was born in Pristina, Kosovo, before fleeing the war and eventually making his way to Berlin. The two met in London in 2010 and became a couple in 2013. You could say that Grand Export is borne out of fashion’s constant change and product design’s striving for permanence.
Where they find common ground is their passion for creating—“The fashion impulse, and the construction impulse,” is how Munzing puts it. They aren’t interested in being disposable or a flash in the pan. As so many brands—new or established, heritage or upstart—try to navigate the eternally roiling state of what people actually want to buy, Grand Export are onto something with their potent mix of old/new, then/now, luxury/post-luxury, and onto it enough that the likes of the iconic LA store H. Lorenzo has snapped them up. (The collection will be delivered in March 2027.)
“We produce a maxium of 20, 30 pieces in the leather.”
Even at this early stage of Grand Export’s life, they’re absolutely clear about how they envisage it going forward. “Grand Export is seasonless and we have limited runs,” says Munzing. “We produce a maximum of 20, 30 pieces in the leather. For us, it’s limitation and scarcity that makes it interesting for us to design; it’s the starting point for our design language.” Take the tracksuits turned into dresses: Berbatovci mentions how they found the suits, “from a guy on Craigslist who was selling about 40 or 50 of them; they’d come from the former East Germany. We had a big bundle of them, took them apart, and reconstructed them [into dresses], with little corsets underneath.”
The leather baby doll dresses, meanwhile, were conjured in part out of utilizing 1950s bras—‘pistol bras’ Munzing calls them, in reference to their pointy, pneumatic shape—while the old shearling came from an eBay seller in Germany. One thing is for sure; the Grand Export designers don’t shy away from challenges. “We like the limitations Berlin puts on us,” Munzing says, with Berbatovci adding, “it makes it easier to design; if we’re limited, we can work.”
Source: Lifestyle
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