WILD ROSE
Art. Culture. Education. #uncuttable.
Berlin has always thrived on people doing things here that, in all reason, perhaps no one would do. They establish clubs in ruins, turn protest into art, and transform a street into a stage. Perhaps that is precisely the reason I asked myself: If a city starts cutting back on education and culture of all things – why should we respond with a conventional fashion show?
WILD ROSE is therefore not a classic fashion show. It is a project I am developing together with students and young creatives from Berlin, which will become part of a large New Year's Eve event at the Victory Column on December 31, 2026. Two collections will meet there – and a runway will turn into a demonstration.
The motto is: #uncuttable.
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Because, of course, politics must manage money. Budgets must work, expenditures must be reviewed, and structures must be questioned. One can debate how parties are financed, how political apparatuses are equipped, which allowances are necessary, and which privileges are still appropriate for our time. A democracy can and should argue about all of this.
But there are two areas where cutting back eventually ceases to be a budgetary issue: education and culture.
For whoever cuts there is not simply cutting a number from a budget. They are cutting opportunities. Workshops. Training offerings. Projects. Stages. Experimental spaces. And eventually, perhaps, the one place where a young person might have discovered for the first time what they are capable of.
The fatal part is: The bill doesn't arrive in the next fiscal year. It arrives years later.
A city cannot simply buy back creativity after it has saved its way out of it. And a country cannot demand courage, innovation, and performance from young people while simultaneously signaling to them that their education and cultural spaces are negotiable, of all things.
Perhaps that is the real question behind WILD ROSE: How much future can you excise from a country before you find it surprising that young people seek their future elsewhere?
For me, fashion is not a decorative sideshow. Fashion is education, craftsmanship, culture, and economy all at once. It emerges from knowledge. From pattern construction, material knowledge, technique, history, experiment, and the freedom to imagine something that did not exist before.
That is why at WILD ROSE, young people will not be the backdrop for a finished idea. They are co-developing this idea. They are designing, constructing, and producing. And in the end, it is not just garments standing on a stage, but the very people whose future is what this discussion is actually about.
And then there is this rose.
Roses do not necessarily look like resistance at first. Perhaps that is exactly their strength. Politically, the connection between a rose and a raised fist became internationally known in the late 1960s through a symbol designed by Marc Bonnet for the French socialist movement. The rose combined something seemingly contradictory: beauty and resistance, vulnerability and determination.
That is exactly where WILD ROSE begins.
Not with the notion that protest must be ugly or loud. But with the conviction that beauty itself can possess a political language. That a perfectly constructed cut can convey a stance just as well as a banner. And that a generation shouldn't have to ask to be heard someday when you can already give them a stage today.
On New Year's Eve, this stage at the Victory Column will become a space for demonstration.
The demonstration will not take place alongside the fashion show.
The fashion show itself will become the demonstration.
For perhaps the most important investment a country makes is not, in the end, one whose return can be calculated in the next fiscal year.
Perhaps it is the one that ensures its next generation believes in its future at all.
WILD ROSE.
#uncuttable.
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