“I knew I would get cancelled for this,” was the first thing Marie Lueder said backstage after her latest Berlin Fashion Week show. The German designer had just been asked about a certain slogan tank top that materialised on the AW25 runway of her eponymous brand LUEDER, one that was sure to get tongues wagging beyond the confines of the show. Just a couple minutes prior, about halfway through the collection, a burly male model with thickset arms and a smouldering stare marched confidently down the catwalk, sheathed in a fitted white tank top, the slogan ‘Men are so BACK’ printed in red lettering across its front. The moment, which happened yesterday (February 2) in the German capital, was met with a flurry of intrigue from guests at the show, with some looking on confusedly, others laughing along with the joke, but most whipping out their iPhones, hurriedly posting the look on their Instagram Stories.

“The idea is, there’s a specific horror in the world,” said Lueder, backstage, when asked about the piece. “It’s about a specific kind of heteronormativity coming back at us,” the designer continued, before adding conclusively, “this is about Donald Trump, basically. Being scared of him coming back.” Although the piece is “totally” a tongue-in-cheek, ironic statement according to the designer, these kinds of things can be easily co-opted by people with ulterior motives, bypassing the parody for their own ends. “Yeah, it worries me a little bit,” responds the designer when asked about the strong likelihood of people taking the piece seriously (or not seriously enough). But she then suggests that the provocation is good, because it will open up conversations about the topic – conversations she herself intends on having with all the men in her life. “I want to talk with my dad about this,” says Lueder. “I can’t wait to sit down with him and talk with him, or anyone. I think it would be a very different conversation with each person.”

For those unclear as to where the joke lies, men are in fact not ‘so back’, and that’s what this flimsy top is trying to demonstrate. The vest itself looks like something you’d pick up from a Jersey City t-shirt shop, or New York’s Canal Street – its plasticky lettering is a far cry from the brand’s high-quality, intricate prints, of which Lueder is a dab hand. Those subtle design codes, along with everything from the fitted workwear jeans paired with the top, to the way the model walked, all parody a certain kind of masculinity. It’s the possibility for misinterpretation – something the designer is fully aware of – which will produce the most interesting conversations around the topic.

The tank was part of a wider AW25 collection called The Shell, which was described as a “journey of transformation” and a “shedding of armor to embrace bold self-expression.” In this way, the catwalk was somewhat of a departure for Lueder, who’d shifted from the cocooning armour of previous seasons and introduced a sexier iteration of the LUEDER man and woman. Though the medieval references will always run through Lueder’s work, this time around there were skintight body stockings, cut-out football tops, nipple-bearing mesh and ostentatious faux fur, with curly talons and blood-red mouths completing the beauty looks. “In her new collection, Marie continues her inquiry into archetypal characters by imagining a variety of 21st-century archetypes,” read the show notes, “such as the hooligan, the decadent romantics, and the undead teenagers.”

Scroll through the gallery above for LUDER’s entire SS25 collection.