“I am going to bid on the ceramic panties.” Edward Buchanan, designer, editor, and one of the loveliest people in fashion, and I are looking at slate gray ceramic underwear which is currently having oil drip-drip-dripped onto it by an antique pipette. “That’s 135-year-old dust,” said Richert Biel’s Michele Biel of the grime covering this old piece of lab equipment. The reason we’re looking at some decorative knickers is because the designers behind Richert Biel—Jale Richert and the aforementioned Biel—are celebrating the opening of their first proper store, in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, by auctioning 10 handmade items from their spring 2027 collection. (The auction closes after one week.)
What we could place your bets on included everything from a white shirt cut from 19th century French bed linen, to latex aprons, to a gorgeous kilt, in a crisp plaid linen, and affixed with a black leather logo-ed patch. If Buchanan wanted the underwear, the Scot in me was craving the kilt. Edward and I discussed how much he should bid. “Hmm, 200 euros?” I hazarded. At that point, Vogue Germany’s Kerstin Weng came over, and reckoned 300 euros, easy.
Michele Biel and Jale Richert make fantastically thoughtful, effortlessly cool clothes, which they take seriously. Yet they’re also possessed of a fantastically sly humor, and a way of cutting through the BS of the fashion system by skewering its pretension and offering instead original and inventive ways to show their work. This auction, for instance: It tickled them pink to have people—not just industry types at a store opening, but their friends and neighbors—come in and bid whatever they wanted for the lots. “We like the idea that people will tell us what they think it’s worth,” Biel said, adding, “it’s fine for us if something goes for 50 euros…but we hope not.”
In a sense, what this duo are really looking for is honesty, in much the same way they’re reveling in what their new store-cum-workspace can offer them: a tangible, direct connection with the customers coming in off the street as much as the designs themselves, with some of their clothing being made in-house. (It’s fantastically well-made, by the way, and surprisingly well-priced, given the quality; a black wool shirt with the faintest white pinstripe running through it, retails for 390 euros. What does that get you from high fashion brands, these days? Not much.)
Their spring 2027 collection is equally up-front about where they are right now. A necessary consolidation of the Richert Biel archetypes, it includes their rather maitresse dresses, tailored to cleave to the body; trousers into which have been worked lingerie-like details; utilitarian windcheaters with collars that gently collapse onto the shoulders; and leather tote bags with extra-long, belt-style straps. Oh, and yes: More underwear. “I’m obsessed as you know,” said Biel, laughing, “with men’s underwear style panties.”
