For the hour or I spent in Berlin’s Einstein Unter den Linden café, I bore witness to the future of fashion—or, perhaps more accurately, a future of it. This city has a tendency to do that, not least because it was Berlin Fashion Week, which was terrific, with a ton of febrile, forward-thinking, and youthful creative energy. (Kudos to those who showed, btw.) That said, the two people sitting in front of me who are helping to power this forward propulsion—Luis Dobbelgarten, the founder of the label NO/FAITH STUDIOS, and his creative co-conspirator, women’s designer, and best friend Moritz (Mo) Himmler—are young by even Berlin’s standards: Both and Mo are a mere 24. (The third member of NO/FAITH STUDIOS—Luis’s brother, Leon, who handles business and logistics —is, at 25, the elder statesman of the group.) Just to make you feel even more inadequate (or is that just me feeling this way?): Dobbelgarten first set up a rudimentary version of his label when he was 13. Impressive doesn’t even begin to cover it.
But let’s back up for a minute, and explain how I came to be here. This is going to sound horribly namedrop-y—ugh, sorry—but at the Chloé show this past February I was sitting beside the photographer Inez Van Lamsweerde, with whom I chatted about new labels. When she mentioned that her son, Charles Matadin, was obsessed with NO/FAITH STUDIOS, it elicited a look of blank incomprehension from me. A quick Google search later, though, made clear the appeal: The label, which really took off with a skater-ish flared pair of jeans, had a youthful, confident way with washed and weathered denim and leather, coolly and cleverly manipulated into jeans and outerwear augmented by an intriguing sense of volume and tricked up with a sophisticated sense of utilitarian detailing. All those buckles and straps and grommets and non-apologetic washing and dying: The look was strong—and so was the point of view. The fashion spidey senses were tingling.
Some months later, and here we are in Berlin, chatting with the team behind the label, thanks to Kerstin Weng of Vogue Germany and Christiane Arp of the Fashion Council Germany. The label’s team is so tight there’s only the three of them. (Though the very cool agency Reference Studios, headed by Mumi Haiati, has been helping the brand navigate the fashion world.) The vibe is that of a startup, even if it has been going now in some form or other for nearly a decade. That’s not at all a diss: Instead, it becomes apparent that part of growing their business has meant keeping it close to the ground, relevant, and real to its hugely loyal and energized global fanbase. They’re snapping up its pieces via direct to consumer and the brand’s pop-ups, along with selling via the likes of Ssense. Like I said: impressive.
As to why the label reflects a future of fashion, that’s down to its punkish, break-the-rules ideas of entrepreneurship and creativity, merged with its outsider status. The label, it turns out, isn’t based in hippity-hip Berlin but, rather, nestled in the small town of Mechernich, in Germany’s Eifel region. (The nearest city to them is actually Cologne, which is an hour away.) And while the crystal ball of fashion is pretty murky even at the best of times, given how pummeled the increasingly corporatized industry is right now, it seems more and more that fierce independents like NO/FAITH STUDIOS who do things their own way—and with clarity—are going to be leading the way.
What follows has been edited for clarity.
Luis, tell me how you started NO/FAITH STUDIOS.
Luis Dobbelgarten: When I was 13 years old I went to a skate camp, and there was a screen printing machine there where we could print our own T-shirts—and I was so obsessed with it. So I came home, sold my sneakers, and sold all my Jordans to get a screen printing machine. My parents hated it, because it makes such a mess [laughs], so I had to make them out in the garden. I sold my first shirts at school. They were nothing special, but I like to be creative, and it was a nice feeling to see the kids in my school wearing what I’d made. When I was 15, I started NO/FAITH STUDIOS. By then, I had my grandmother, and the grandmother of a good friend of mine, working with me. We’d go to H&M, buy cargo pants, and then we’d change them: “Can you sew a zipper on the side?” “Can you do a patch here?” It was more like upcycling. We did our first NO/FAITH STUDIOS drops in 2016, when I was 16.
Did they sell well?
Luis: They were successful in my town, but not like internet successful. I was selling at school and the skate park. Then I went to sell at a skate park in Cologne, with all my shirts lying on the ground. People would ask “How much?” and I didn’t have any prices. I was like, “How much do you want to give me? 20? OK. Let’s say 25.” Our first denim drop was our flared jeans in 2020, when I was 20. We had maybe 50 pairs and I was thinking, Damn—fifty denims to sell.
Talk to me about going from screen-printing tees and customizing cargo pants to making jeans. They’re technical, so that’s a pretty big step. How did you find someone to make them?
Luis: Our first production was in China. We had tried Turkey, but no one wanted to do crazy denims with a lot of details because we weren’t doing big quantities. To be honest, we found our production through social media: I was on Instagram, searching #production, #denim production—stuff like that—and we managed to find a very good production company in China. We had no real experience—I hadn’t gone to fashion school; I just learned everything myself—but we sold about 10,000 pairs. It’s crazy how quickly China works, but at this moment we want to move everything to Italy, because it’s the place for denim. There, or Japan. But China helped a lot with growing the brand.
In what way?
Luis: We did a Black Friday sale last year and sold 5,000 bomber jackets. It was crazy, because we didn’t have a sample of the jacket—it had been photoshopped from the black version we had made, but we wanted to also drop a green one. We thought, Okay—maybe we sell 300 of the green; the black will sell way better. But the green one sold so well, it was like, Damn—maybe we have a problem. Hopefully China can do it in time. They made 5,000 bomber jackets in three weeks. Sometimes I like stuff like this—if you’re a big company, you can’t work like that.
Mo Himmler: In the first year of a small company, you have to take risks to grow, to make really big steps.
Are you thinking about what might be your next steps? An investor? Doing your first runway show?
Luis: Yeah, to be honest, for a company with three people to make the next step it’s necessary, I think, to maybe have investors. And we’re thinking about doing a runway show, but I don’t want to do a show just to do a show—a lot of brands do that. I want to do a show so you get a feeling after the show. This is what I love. After a show you might love it, you might hate it, but you had a feeling.
Tell me a bit more about where you’re based—your studio is here in Berlin, yes?
Luis: We’ve had a studio in Berlin for six months now, but we are actually from the countryside, six hours away, in Mechernich. It’s in the middle of fucking nowhere—like, the bus comes every two hours. There’s nothing to do, but I like it there. I like to be in nature. I don’t go out, I don’t do parties, I don’t do anything. I just like to design, and have my freedom.
I grew up there; my parents live there. I live in my studio. [As the label got bigger] I had to find a studio, and there was this old building where I went when I was younger to play soccer, as there’s a soccer field nearby—I was like, One day I’ll have a studio there. When I turned 18 and left school, I rented a space there, and now we have four big studios in the building.
How do the three of you split up the work of running the label?
Luis: Mo helps with design and creative direction, and my big brother, Leon, does the management and the business side of the company. We have a shipper in Cologne, but we do everything else by ourselves: all the designing, the drawings, the technical specifications; we create all the shoots. The last collection was 50 looks—and we did everything. It’s not easy, because normally for this amount of work, you’d have a bigger team. People see the brand on social media, and….
Mo: It looks like a team of 20 people behind the label.
So, where are you sampling your collections?
Luis: We have a sampling room in Italy, so we’re not sewing the pieces. [As for fittings,] we have one good friend who lives in the next town, and he’s a good model, so we work with him every time.
Mo: Back when I joined Luis about three years ago, when he made pants or jackets it was always in a size L, because that’s what fit him. So he was our first fit model—he just went to the mirror and looked at the new piece he was wearing, and he’d be like, “Okay, it’s cool”—or not.
Luis: With the leather jackets, because it was so expensive to sample them, as we’re doing it in Italy… I don’t have rich parents who gave me a lot of money to start a brand, so I made every piece in my size, so I could wear them—and if I wore something longer than a week, then I knew I had to do a drop around it, because I wanted it for myself: What I like, my customers will like too.
It’s interesting, because there’s always this idea that you can only create fashion if you’re in a big metropolitan environment….
Luis: I love my hometown, because I can just be myself in the studio. Also, there wasn’t really anyone else into fashion in my town, and I like that. When you go to a city, everyone is into fashion; everyone is a designer; everyone is a stylist. And I’d always just say, “Oh—I do clothes.” I wasn’t going to say I was a designer. And people would say, “How do you make clothes in the Eifel?” But I like it there—I like the freedom, because no one will call you to say, Come to the bar, come to the restaurant. I like to be with my best friend, designing. And when you do great work, people will come. You need to connect with the right person, not a hundred people. So I don’t have the feeling to go to Paris or Berlin. They’re so expensive—I can have a 200-square-meter studio, or a one-bedroom in Paris or Berlin. I need the space—it’s so important to, I don’t know, feel free.
What do you put your success down to—besides what you’re making, which clearly is really connecting?
Luis: Community is the most important thing right now for all the new and upcoming brands. There are a lot of great designers, but they can’t build a community. Things have changed a little bit—the new generation changed a little bit—because right now it’s about community: To speak with your audience, to do events, pop-ups, speak with the people, be cool with the people—I think that’s so important. We did a pop-up two months ago in Cologne and had people sleeping in front of the store for like five days. And I was like, “Why are you sleeping in front of the store?” [People would respond] “We love it—it’s a feeling of community.”
Pop-ups are the new going out, the new parties. In Paris during fashion week is when all the cool kids are doing pop-ups. There’s this guy Clint from London—his label, Corteiz, is one of the biggest streetwear brands right now, with 1.5 million followers. He does the craziest pop-ups—people are fighting for his stuff; London shuts down when he does a pop-up there. The price point is also really important right now—so important for denim. We want to keep a price point of 200, 250 euros, even when we move to Italy. A lot of brands make great products, but they just keep the price so expensive.
Mo: You can’t create a culture with that—if you want to get the kids and the young people, you have to have prices which are affordable. I think also the definition of a designer has completely changed. Twenty years ago, you had to be a perfect pattern cutter, a good sewer; now, it’s more How can you build up a culture? Of course, you have to have a vision….
Luis: Actually, maybe it’s a little sad to see that the community is more important than the clothes—that people just want to see, maybe, a boring sweatshirt with a name on it or something. Sometimes I feel like, Yeah—that’s fashion nowadays.
You mentioned you were into skate culture. But were you also into fashion growing up?
I was interested in clothes. My big brother showed me [brands], and skate culture also brought me to fashion a lot, because I saw all these different styles in skateboarding. When I was in school, I just drew shows. I just wanted to create….maybe it wasn’t fashion, but I wanted to create something—just to create. Maybe at some point I’d love to create, I don’t know, chairs or… everything is art. I am not sure I want to create clothes my whole life. Maybe in 10 years I will do something different. I don’t want to be just a designer who does denim.
Are there designers you admire?
Luis: [Alexander] McQueen is, I think, the all-time greatest. I watched the documentary [about him] maybe 200 times. I’ve looked at all the shows and have all the books. And also Raf Simons. I have a Raf tattoo—it’s from my favorite collection of his, Virginia Creeper. Raf was very big to me. And Helmut Lang. And as a brand, I really like Chrome Hearts. What Richard Stark has built with that brand…. There’s an old guy in my hometown, and he showed me all this stuff about Chrome Hearts, because he’s a good friend of Richard’s. A few months ago, he showed me images of things they’d done in the ’90s and I was like, damn.
All of these designers had and have very strong and authentic points of view, and weren’t necessarily about being quote-unquote commercial….
Luis: That’s what made them so successful—it has nothing to do with being commercial. We started as an Instagram brand, and at some point we had to be a bit more commercial to make money, but I want to go away from this commerciality a little: I don’t want to drop [only] zippered jackets; I want to be more and more creative—but I can only do the creative and crazy stuff when we have money, because it’s so expensive to do the creative things, and they don’t bring us money.
As the brand grows even bigger, how do you hold on to that sense of freedom that’s clearly so important to you?
Luis: I’m trying to maintain it as best as I can. I know it’s getting harder and harder, because now there are payrolls, expectations of my customers, and the pressure rising with every collection and every shooting. But I came to a point where I realized that I really have to trust my own creativity and workflow. Sometimes you don’t make the perfect decision, but at least you were free in the decision making, so it was also not the wrong decision.
What would be the dream place to be in three years time?
Luis: In three years, I hope that everything matures and that you can see it on the runways of the world. I just grew up with the brand, and I think you can really see that our customers are growing up with it, too. In three years, our first customers will be in their late 20s, and I want the brand to mature with them. I think the Made in Italy denim line that we just sneak-peeked is the perfect example of timeless pieces that have our DNA but are still innovative—like our collections over the last two years.