4ME4YOU features designer MARKE during Berlin Fashion Week SS26.
DESIGNER: MARKE
Backstage at MARKE’s SS26 presentation during Berlin Fashion Week, the atmosphere was steeped in a quiet, reflective energy — a world apart from the usual frenzy.
Designer Mario Keine, the creative force behind MARKE, offered a deeply personal and literary collection this season titled “The Summer I Never Had.” It’s a meditation on queer coming-of-age — not only as a narrative but as a form of absence, of missed moments, of love imagined in silence.
MARKE’s SS26 garments whisper rather than shout. The palette is deliberately subdued, echoing the quietude of hidden glances and half-written letters never sent. Floral and checkered jacquards provide moments of softness and texture — metaphors for tender exchanges and coded communication.
Volume is key in this season’s tailoring. Wide-legged trousers, billowing sleeves, and relaxed shapes evoke both freedom and distance, a physical manifestation of yearning. These are clothes for wandering, for dreaming, for remembering.
“The Summer I Never Had” isn’t just a title — it’s an elegy. Each piece in the collection feels like a page from a personal archive: tokens of a first crush, the shirt worn to a secret meeting, a jacket that remembers the warmth of someone once held close. MARKE isn’t just designing clothes; Keine is designing moments that never got to happen — and giving them shape at last.
MARKE’s collection was a subdued triumph — poignant, literary, and emotionally intelligent. In a world of ever-accelerating trends, “The Summer I Never Had” is a reminder of fashion’s power to pause, reflect, and reclaim lost stories.
