Berlin Fashion Week, July 2025 – Marie Lueder’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection SLⱯY unfolds as an intense, multi-layered ritual, somewhere between psychodrama, theatre, and fashion commentary. Charged with references to medieval iconography, digital exhaustion and emotional legacy, the collection builds a narrative that looks inward while challenging external structures.

The starting point is the myth of Saint George and the Dragon – not as a heroic epic, but as a fragmented mirror of contemporary struggles. The dragon becomes a shifting metaphor for control, fear and invisible power dynamics. Traditional roles of hero and monster dissolve and give way to a fluid exploration of identity, resistance, and transformation.

Aesthetically, the collection weaves contrasts together: sculptural tailoring collided with soft, semi-transparent fabrics. Functional sportswear elements that were once symbols of speed and strength, are deconstructed, reassembled into corsetry and charged with symbolic meaning. The idea of how violence and protection visually manifest is retranslated through modular sportswear language. Streetwear is recoded – as emotional armor or as a delicate act of resistance.

Floral motifs appear as central visuals – not in a romantic or decorative way, but raw and intimate. These domestic flowers, airbrushed directly onto skin and footwear by artist Mia Violet, merge body, garment, and ornament into a single, breathing surface. Equally striking: the customized UGGs, transformed into carriers of narrative and symbol.

A scenographic highlight comes in the form of a monumental, moving dragon sculpture by Esben Weile Kjaer, installed at the end of the runway – shimmering in silver, pulsating like a digital relic from another era. Kjaer himself joins the performance, blurring the line between object, artist, and model.

The show’s choreographic direction is led, as always, by David Varhegyi, whose performative, extravagant walk has become synonymous with the Lueder universe. His movement direction gives the show rhythmic depth – physical, charged, almost ritualistic. Varhegyi appears not only as choreographer but as the performative face of the brand.

With appearances from actors and performers Ruby Commey, Luisa Gaffron and Roman Ole, the runway extends beyond fashion into a psychological space. Who is the hero? Who the dragon? Who the observer? There are no fixed answers, only roles dissolving and reassembling in motion.

SLⱯY is Lueder’s most complex engagement yet with the interplay of textile, identity and societal structure. The collection oscillates between dystopian symbolism, romantic kitsch and a renegotiation of everyday codes. Sportswear becomes an emotional carrier, upcycling a strategy of self-assertion and fashion a stage for the unspeakable.

At its core, SLⱯY remains what Marie Lueder does best: radically conceptual, tenderly powerful and artistically uncompromising.