Grandexport, the Label Giving New Life to the No-Longer Needed

Paulina Münzing and Gent Berbatovci, the designers behind Berlin-based brand Grandexport, make “post heritage luxury products” from disused garments – “each piece becomes a conversation between us,” they say

1. Who is it? Grandexport is the label from Berlin-based design duo Paulina Münzing and Gent Berbatovci. 
2. Why do I want it? For time-slipped pieces made from forgotten fabrics, as clever as they are wearable.
3. Where can I find it? Grandexport will soon be available at H Lorenzo, Los Angeles.

Who is it? Four years before they had even an inkling of what the clothes would look like, designers Paulina Münzing and Gent Berbatovci had a name for their label: Grandexport, borrowed from a street near their home in Berlin which is lined with import-export shops that sell “everything from fragrance to car tyres, TVs to children’s playthings.” “We liked it because you don’t know what it is,” says Berbatovci of the cryptic quality the name shares with the shops. It’s a fitting provenance for a brand with a knack for transposition: following a small first drop at the start of 2026, its second, and most recent, collection, Trophies, carries military knitwear, old GDR blankets and secondhand tracksuits a long way from their first lives and into what the pair call “post heritage luxury products.”

Where Münzing trained in fashion design, Berbatovci came into the label almost sideways, via product design and illustration. The latter has given him an understanding of silhouette and body, but product design has taught him to look at making a jacket, as Münzing puts it, “like making a stool.” Each design passes back and forth – “he starts sketching, I start three-dimensional” – until “the pieces become a conversation between us,” she explains. At fittings Berbatovci will ask the model whether she can move her arms, sit down and walk, then turns to Münzing with his second question: “Would you wear it? Yes or no?” And if the answer is no, the piece is cancelled.

For Trophies, the pair enlisted photographer Sharna Osborne, who shot the collection in her signature filmic lo-fi – a canny hedge between then and now, a sort of refrain of the label’s time-slipped designs – alongside stylist Emma Wyman, art directors Carina Frey and Stefanie Barth and casting director Julia Lange. “It’s also nice to start with a team who knows exactly what they’re doing from the start,” Münzing reflects, “because we can go together as we grow.”

Why do I want it? Unlike the shops behind the name, which trade in happy nonsense, Grandexport’s garments are curious yet entirely logical: they barely resemble the materials they began as, though each keeps the charge it was made with. A batch of counterfeit Sergio Tacchini tracksuits, bought from a man whose uncle had been selling them before the Berlin Wall fell, have been picked apart and puzzled into dresses, with a corset inside, a wired-open neckline and the jacket’s ribbed waistband for a hem. Army tent fabric from the GDR, once woven to be strong enough for any terrain, becomes a camouflage mini skirt and top which button together, come apart and recombine with the layers above.

Strip away the salvage and the designs hold up on their own, novel in cut and construction. A leather babydoll dress, made in black and in a dusty rose from GDR stock a dealer was ready to write off, is wired down the front so the leather holds a ripple, the pleated satin cups of a 1950s bullet bra set into its neckline; the same wire runs through a leather pencil skirt, letting it take a new line at the wearer’s hand. A ribbed red jumper zips at both collar and hem, so it can be worn either way up, and a double polo flips to change the shoulder. On first glance, each piece is askew and odd enough to catch the eye, but after closer inspection it comes into itself, making perfect sense.

With past and present so neatly stitched, Grandexport envisages growing the way its clothes are made, by the same lateral logic. Berbatovci, the inveterate hunter of the two, tracks down unworn stock and the pair mixes his finds with deadstock, since his finds alone would yield, they reckon, “like one collection in three years”; even so, the collections stay small and concise. Everything is made in Berlin, between a leather specialist and their own studio, outside the seasonal calendar – the gift is in how they look at what they find. It is, as the pair put it, “like a natural scarcity that we work with, which we like totally.”

Where can I find it? Grandexport will soon be available at H Lorenzo, Los Angeles.