Namilia makes you look like a hot mess

We’ve all been there… following all the voices in our head instead of our friend’s advice. Sometimes you need to do it for the plot, see where it takes you. “Starting your own business is a big hot mess,” jokes Nan Li, one half of Namilia, the Berlin-based fashion brand known for its gender-neutral clubwear rooted in queer culture and sexual freedom. Together with counterpart Emilia Pfohl, the duo has been delusional enough to turn a university project into a viable and oftentimes viral fashion universe over the past ten years. 

Namilia’s designs are often seen as playful provocations: macro skirts, cunt strings and tiny belt tops. For us, they went playful with words and teamed up with Rhian Teasdale, frontwoman of the British indie rock band Wet Leg, to create a limited three-piece collection of a fitted top, t-shirt and cap with slogans like “not a passenger” and “hot mess.” “I really like her energy and how she plays with gender,” Li says about the warm collaboration. “She had really strong ideas and materials she wanted to work with.” 

To celebrate the collection launch, Berlin-based design studio YONT created an installation at KaDeWe rooted in the analogue. As a sonic core, Namilia curated around 140 cassette tapes from Björk to Frank Ocean, welcoming everyone to listen and pause for a moment. It’s a place to calm your nervous system, which serves as a reminder to stay true to ourselves in a world full of digital noise, constant input and too many voices telling us who to be. 

It’s easy to fall into the abyss of the internet, doom-scrolling our hearts out. “To have all of this information, to see what others are doing, to have direct access to your community is all great, but at the same time you need to find ways to ground yourself,” explains Lin about the ambivalence of the online world. For the fashion designer this means less online antics and more self-care routines like therapy and family time. You can fall into the rabbit hole as long as you know how to get out of it again.