With the chink of glass, the tinkle of the piano, and the murmur of conversation—the cocktail of sounds you’d hear in just about any hotel bar anywhere in the world—the Avenir show began. Creative director Sophie Claussen chose the Royal Chateau hotel’s lounge to present the label’s fall 2025 collection, and it all started so quietly, so unobtrusively, that it seemed to be part of the continuum of quotidian life happening there on a daily basis. For Claussen, there’s likely no higher praise than that. Avenir has found its own distinctive and unique groove in the ubercool and oft raucous fashion landscape of Berlin not only because of its deep commitment to circularity—just about everything here comes with a backstory, and a good one at that; there’s real thought and commitment going on with these clothes—but also because it has made a virtue of quietness—and realness.
Claussen leant into late ’70s-cum-early ’80s silhouettes: faintly bourgeois belted coats (maybe with the collar jauntily popped up) and shirt dresses with volume kept in place and under control with nipped waists; wide leg classic pants precisely tailored, with the twist of low-slung back pockets; and a cozy multi-ply cashmere knit and matching scarf, worn with an A-line skirt from a glazed cotton that had been wadded for warmth.
Yet chat to Claussen and the look is only half the story. A coat might be conjured up out of old German army blankets, their striped edges visible inside the coat’s cuffs. The cashmere comes from a program of rescued and recycled shredded yarns; and, the tweeds, as well as the cotton poplin shirting (cut to look coolly askew), are all deadstock fabrics. Upcycled denim, a signature of Avenir’s, was patchworked into a long wrap skirt, or the threads used for a handknit cardigan. “The idea was to take denim, this universal material that everyone understands,” said Claussen, “but make it like a crown jewel through the application of craft.”
It can feel, of course, that these are practices and approaches that are pretty commonplace these days, yet the truth is they’re really not commonplace enough. Waste still sadly reigns supreme. It’s everything for the Avenir team though; the beginning, the middle and the end of how you create. Except not quite everything: There’s also a love of drawing from Avenir’s community to tell its story every season.
This time round, with the idea of exploring the intersection between fashion, craft, and art, that meant working with the Berlin based British painter Arthur Laidlaw, who’s a friend of Claussen’s. He was responsible for the declarative sweeps of hand-painted blues across a coat or pants, a kind of wearable canvas, as well as donating his old paint-splattered sheeting to turn into one of the shirt dresses, and a capacious shoulder tote. Elsewhere, the jewelry brand Prum, another friend of Avenir’s, threaded unpolished natural stones onto lengths of rope-like leather thonging for necklaces, belts, or the straps of a very pretty scarlet chiffon top and skirt cut on the bias. Those jeweled straps, much like everything else in this Avenir collection, didn’t need to sparkle to shine.
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