You Must Create: Berlin Fashion Week loves mdh

You Must Create: Berlin Fashion Week Opens with a collective act of design 

(2. Juli 2026) Berlin Fashion Week opened this year not with a runway, but with an invitation. You Must Create, an interactive crowd performance created and organized by 
Prof. Natascha von Hirschhausen, moved the design process out of the atelier and into shared space. 

It wasn't built for watching. It was built for making. Visitors weren't spectators — they became collaborators in the act of design itself, contributing to what ultimately formed both the performance and the exhibition on view. 

The project sits with questions that have long run through Natascha von Hirschhausen's practice: who gets to think form? Who decides how clothing comes into being — and for whom? For a body of work that has consistently challenged the industry's foundational assumptions around sizing, gender, production, and seasonal cycles, You Must Create opened that process up entirely, and made the audience part of the answer. 

Natascha von Hirschhausen is Professor at mdh, where she was supported on this project by fellow Fashion Management professor Nina Hein. Together, they brought mdh close to the process: students of Fashion Management came by, took part in the performance, and became part of both the exhibition and the resulting crowd designs. The dress forms were kindly lent by mdh. 

The performance's standout moment came, when Gitta Connemann — Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the Federal Government's Commissioner for the Mittelstand — joined and created her own design, after Natascha opened the session by creating the showpiece silk gown. 

You Must Create took place within RAUM.Berlin, an event by Fashion Council Germany, supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (based on a resolution of the German Bundestag), and by cotonea. 

If you'd rather create than watch from the sidelines, the Fashion Management programme at mdh might be exactly your thing. 

Apply now for the winter semester — until 30 September.