In the baking heat of Haderlump designer Johann Ehrhardt’s show venue, a non air-conditioned former vintage furniture warehouse in the Alt-Treptow neighborhood, it seemed the cuboid edifice that took center stage on his runway, covered as it was in thousands of ex libris paper book plates, might burst into flames any minute, it was so hot. And how’s that for an indictment on our world burning right now in oh so many ways? Not that the heat was in any way Ehrhardt’s fault: the current Berlin heatwave has come out of nowhere, and he and his team and models were working in a backstage space only marginally (and I do mean marginally) cooler. And it wasn’t book burning that was on his mind, but a far more romantic and lyrical narrative.
Ehrhardt has been taking tango and salsa lessons at a Berlin bar called Bepop (there is something quite endearing about this cool black-clad towering dude learning to trip the light fantastic) and he’s befriended an older couple who also go to Bebop, who gifted him with an aviator-themed ex libris plate dating from 1913, just as he was working on a collection to be shown at Berlin’s historic Tegel airport. He visited the couple at their home for dinner, and discovered they had a vast collection of books with an equally vast—80,000, reckons Ehrhardt—collection of antique book plates. “I remember thinking, no one knows about these anymore,” he said. “My generation would never think to put one in a book.” He pored over them for hours, and they led him to his spring 2026 collection.
Those book plates would often feature illustrations of legendary figures, and mythic characters, sometimes in equally memorable clothing, swaggering historic tailored garb, say, or ancient draped robes. The former Ehrhardt has down to a tee, as this collection ably demonstrated, regardless of the gender that was wearing it on the runway. There were plenty of jackets in cotton drill or glazed leather cut with edge and attitude, notably those which were on the roomy side, their capacious sleeves featuring bias seams which injected movement into them. Ehrhardt also knows his way around a floorsweeping, ever so slightly f—ked up greatcoat (present and correct here, in hammered and embroidered khaki-ish brown wool) as well as a big, bad black blouson jacket, his featuring a curving chest panel, and worn with a pleated skirt layered over tacking-stitched trousers, while another in olive sported a monk-like hood.
Yet those plates also took him somewhere new: the drawn by hand robes and togas inspired him to try draping for the first time, with he and his team energized by the idea of taking this most noble and elegant of techniques, and allying it to the label’s resolutely urban look. It turned up as a strictly waisted black top with a billowing, rather Edwardian skirt, say, or a diaphanous gown that moved like a cloud. “It was a lot of late nights to get it right,” Ehrhardt said, “but I’m happy we did it.” And how does he think he made the fine art of draping true to Haderlump? “We wanted ours to feel comfortable,” Ehrhardt replied, “and also with this sense of safety, and cocooning. Yet it’s for Haderlump,” he continued, smiling, “so it also needed to have some toughness.”
