Kenneth Ize: BERLIN FW AW 2026

SøEdited Team
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe
Photography: Harry Mille

​Presented as an intervention rather than a conventional runway, Kenneth Ize’s Fall–Winter 2026 collection unfolds against a backdrop of global fatigue. The atmosphere is one of fragmentation and introspection. Instead of offering spectacle, Ize poses a quieter, more difficult question: what have we done wrong?

Titled JOY, the collection approaches the word cautiously. There is no easy optimism here. Joy is treated as something interior and hard-won, an emotion that must be confronted before it can be expressed. Clothing becomes the site of that negotiation, less costume than conversation.

Collaboration forms the collection’s underlying rhythm. Ongoing exchanges with artists, friends, family and long-standing creative partners filter directly into the work. The garments feel communal, as though shaped by many hands and histories. Rather than asserting a singular voice, the collection allows space for overlap, for memory, movement and dialogue to coexist within the same silhouette.

Textile remains Ize’s most fluent language. Handwoven aso oke meets velvet, wool and denim; linings are exposed, seams allowed to surface. Materials associated with protection and structure are subtly unsettled, blurring the line between interior and exterior. What is usually concealed becomes part of the visible composition, suggesting vulnerability not as weakness, but as adornment.

There is a lived tactility throughout, fabrics that seem to carry the trace of touch and travel. In drawing the inside outward, Ize gestures toward emotional transparency. JOY does not deny the present moment’s instability. Instead, it proposes connection, through craft and shared making, as a deliberate, sustaining act.