Photography: Carmen Teixeira| @carmensheis
Text by Irina Rusinovich
During Berlin Art Week, Haderlump and Sven Marquardt came together at PLATTE for an encounter between clothing and photography shaped by a shared relationship with Berlin.
Berlin has spent decades turning its own visual identity into an export. The severity of its architecture, the mythology of its nightlife, the black clothing, industrial spaces and faces that appear to belong simultaneously to the city’s past and present have become so recognisable that they are now easily reproduced. What is considerably harder to reproduce is the cultural proximity that created this language in the first place.
During Berlin Art Week, Haderlump Atelier Berlin and photographer Sven Marquardt approached that relationship from two different directions. Presented at PLATTE as part of its fifth anniversary and first official participation in Berlin Art Week, the project placed a selection of Haderlump garments alongside photographs by Marquardt, creating an encounter between fashion and image that felt less like a conventional collaboration than two interpretations of the same environment.
Photography: Carmen Teixeira| @carmensheis
The title „The Sky Over Berlin“ is particularly fitting. Both practices are closely associated with a version of the city that exists beyond its more polished cultural image, although neither needs to illustrate Berlin literally in order to communicate it.
Marquardt has long photographed people with an attention to character that resists the usual hierarchy between beauty and imperfection. His subjects do not appear neutralised for the camera; individuality remains visible in faces, bodies, gestures and the way people occupy the frame. For the presentation at PLATTE, a curated selection of photographs originally created for a SLEEK editorial in December 2024 was brought into conversation with Haderlump’s clothing.
That distinction matters because fashion photography can easily become subordinate to the garment, just as clothing in an exhibition can become an object isolated from the body that gives it meaning. Here, neither medium was required to explain the other. The relationship emerged through a shared interest in silhouette, identity and presence.
Haderlump approaches many of the same questions materially. Its sculptural silhouettes and urban vocabulary have developed within Berlin rather than merely borrowing the city as an aesthetic reference. Against Marquardt’s photography, the clothes become part of a larger visual language in which fashion operates not simply as styling, but as one of the ways identity is constructed and made visible.
Photography: Carmen Teixeira| @carmensheis
What makes the pairing convincing is that photography and fashion are allowed to retain their different functions while revealing what they share. The point is not to declare clothing art, but to observe how image and garment can carry different versions of the same cultural experience.
PLATTE provides a logical setting for that exchange. Since opening, the Berlin platform has developed beyond the conventional function of a fashion store, positioning itself as a meeting point for independent fashion, art, music and other creative practices. Its fifth anniversary marked its first official participation in Berlin Art Week through ART/PLATTE, extending that interdisciplinary approach into the wider programme of the week.
The evening introduced a third element through Berlin-based artist, DJ, producer and curator Luca Eck, whose practice connects Berlin’s underground scene with a younger international queer electronic culture. Rather than functioning simply as an accompanying soundtrack, Eck’s presence completed a triangle that has historically been fundamental to Berlin’s creative identity: image, clothing and music occupying the same cultural space.
There is something particularly relevant about revisiting that relationship now. Berlin’s underground has been photographed, branded and referenced so extensively that its visual codes can circulate almost independently from the culture that produced them. Black clothing, concrete, severity and club imagery are easy to appropriate; the communities and exchanges behind those images are considerably less portable.
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Photography: Carmen Teixeira | @carmensheis
„The Sky Over Berlin“ works because it does not need to reconstruct that mythology. Haderlump and Marquardt already occupy different positions within the cultural landscape from which it developed, while PLATTE has spent five years creating a physical meeting point for many of the disciplines around it. The collaboration feels strongest when understood not as an attempt to define a Berlin aesthetic, but as evidence that the city’s visual language continues to be produced through encounters between people and practices.
A garment changes once it encounters a body, just as a photograph changes according to who stands in front of the camera. Meaning is produced somewhere between the object, the individual and the person looking.
For one night during Berlin Art Week, those relationships occupied the same room.
Perhaps that is a more convincing portrait of contemporary Berlin than another attempt to photograph the city itself.
ART × FASHION / PURPLEHAZE
Photography from the event: Carmen Teixeira
Presented by PLATTE.Berlin
Featuring Haderlump Atelier Berlin, Sven Marquardt and Luca Eck
Berlin Art Week 2026
Text EiC Irina Rusinovich
