And we’re back: To a snow-laden Berlin for its fall 2026 fashion week, and, if the first day’s Ioannes show is anything to go by, to the 1990s. Hard-edged minimalism shaded black, brown, or ivory. Lean jackets and even leaner bootleg pants with seams snaking around the body. Coats in shaggy shearling or what was called back in the day ponyskin except it wasn’t, it was leather made to look just like it. Skinny cardigans straining to do up. Miniscule bras as tops. One-shouldered blouses with swishy trailing panels and worn with yet more of those kick-hemmed pants. Stilettoes with viciously pointy toes and straps wrapping the ankles ballet slipper style. Killer shades. Slicked back hair. Sparkly showstopper earrings. Sex served up with a soupcon of menace. You know: the ’90s.
For Ioannes designer Johannes Boehl Cronau though this wasn’t solely an exercise in stylistic decade referencing. Six or so years in with his label, which he founded in Paris, he’d allowed himself the luxury of a little looking back to materialize this collection. “I was thinking about what motivates me, and what motivates me is memory,” Boehl Cronau said. “This is the collection I’ve allowed myself to listen to myself the most. It does, yes, feel like the most personal one I’ve done.”
And when he looked back, it was the 1990s which he found imprinted on his memory; the remembrance of his mother from that time, looking gorgeous and chic in her spare, sleek clothing and pointy shoes. His thinking, he said, was to take the fragrance of that memory, and make it feel as powerful and present for today; to be understandable, and relatable, to his sisters, to the women he works with, the women around him, the women he counts as friends
But it wasn’t only the important women in his life, or the halcyon days of the closing decade of the 20th century, which were on his mind. The years he has been in business were writ large too. Truth be told, for all the ’90s-isms in his collection, this was indeed Boehl Cronau at his most himself: strict linearity mixed with the frivolity of lingerie; the spareness, the sexiness, and the preference to strip away any kind of fussiness to attain some refinement. It’s what he’s built his label on, and right now, what felt right, was to go further and deeper into what he likes to design.
What was also on his mind as he worked was the challenge today of running a brand like his, an independent David in a world of corporate Goliaths, something which it’s safe to say is only going to be echoed throughout the fall 2026 season—and beyond. “There’s a question, I think, of how small brands, who love to do fashion, operate in the future,” he said. “So, this collection is also really a love letter to the industry that sometimes it’s tough to be part of. It felt like the right moment to really double down and do something with the most pleasure and generosity I can.”
