Culture – Numéro Berlin

The New England Patriots and Distorted People Unite for Exclusive Capsule Collection in Berlin

Anna Klusmeier — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:09:18 +0000

The beauty of Movement and Cultural Exchange

The New England Patriots made a fashionable touchdown in Germany last week, teaming up with Munich-based streetwear label Distorted People to launch a limited-edition capsule collection celebrating the team’s first official visit to the German capital. The launch event took place at the Distorted People flagship store in Berlin, drawing a vibrant crowd of NFL players, local artists and fans.

Blending American football heritage with Berlin’s urban fashion scene, Distorted People and the New England Patriots launched a collection that represents both athletic excellence and street culture. For the Patriots, this marks a significant step in deepening their connection with fans across Germany and is an important moment for the NFL’s growing presence in Europe.

Also present was Paris-based photographer Amadou Ba – also known as Ueart – who showcased a series of exclusive photo prints called “Rhythms of Strength”.“I explore the physics of human presence, how energy moves through bodies, how rhythm organizes force, and how motion becomes a language of consciousness. (…) The body, in this series, becomes both instrument and experiment: a site where science meets spirit, and where discipline reveals poetry.” The presence of his work at the event reminds us to keep considering the beauty of movement and cultural exchange.

image credit UEART (AMADOU BA)

“The Patriots stand for passion, excellence, and unity. With Distorted People, we’ve found a partner who shares these values, and together we’ve created a collection that embodies them,” said Alex Foster, Senior Manager of International Business for the New England Patriots. “Together, we want to offer our fans in the DACH region something exclusive and high-quality.”

For the NFL, this partnership represents more than just a fashion statement. It’s a cultural bridge. American football is still a developing sport in Berlin, but collaborations like this one open new avenues for engagement, especially among younger audiences who connect through lifestyle, music, and streetwear.

image credit NE Patriots x Distorted-People

On Sunday, the day after the launch, fans gathered once again for the NFL game in Berlin, marking another historic moment for the league.

The weekend symbolized more than fashion and sport; it represented a cultural crossover and a glimpse into what the future of American football in Germany could look like.

TO WATCH: “DIE MY LOVE” BY LYNNE RAMSAY

Anna Klusmeier — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 12:43:15 +0000

The child is parked on the porch. The mother crawls across the grass-covered ground on all fours like a panther. She reveals her animalistic side. The animal thing that drives us to pair up, to have sex, and to fall in love is the precursor to the adored pink being crying on the porch.

In Die My Love, Lynne Ramsay paints a raw and uncompromising portrait of a woman consumed by love and madness. With her suspiciously often absent husband, Jackson, things spiral further out of control. Screaming matches, violent outbursts, and a complete lack of understanding for one another. Fueled by Grace’s internal collapse, she leaves behind a trail of destruction.

Grace and Jackson move into a small house surrounded by nature, forests, wide fields, and, above all, silence. A silence that should have dissolved into thin air with the birth of their child. What begins as an idyllic life slowly but surely turns into a nightmare for Grace. Overwhelmed by her newfound role as a mother and isolated by the remoteness of their home, she begins to lose her mind. What starts as an unfulfilled sexual desire soon turns into the slow burning of her psyche.

TO WATCH: “YUNAN” BY AMEER FAKHER ELDIN

Anna Klusmeier — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 11:41:26 +0000

Munir is ill, haunted by tormenting thoughts that deny him any sense of purpose on this earth. Solitude is what he seeks, even as it begins to destroy him. In silence, he hopes to reflect on his final decision.

YUNAN, by Ameer Fakher Eldin, tells the story of a man torn apart, unable to find a place where he truly belongs. The film explores the feeling of being displaced, not only geographically but also existentially. It dwells in the in-between spaces that arise when belonging is lost.

Munir flees to Hallig Langeneß in Schleswig-Holstein, a place that itself stands as a symbol of transience. Like Munir, it is marked by fragility and isolation. “Land under” becomes a state that brings forth fear for one’s own existence and calls the future into question. Surrounded by water and cut off from the mainland, Munir finds an unexpected connection with Valeska, the woman who takes him in.

The language barrier does not seem to weaken their bond; they need few words to understand each other. Kindness and compassion help Munir to set out on a new path, in the hope of redefining his place in the world.

Christian Stemmler — ANFANG / BEGINNING: BERLIN 1994–99

Anna Klusmeier — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 10:22:18 +0000

Between 1994 and 1999, Berlin stood at a threshold, still marked by the traces of division yet already vibrating with a new kind of energy. It was a city that had not yet decided what it wanted to become, a space of contradictions and experiments, raw and unfinished. In ANFANG / BEGINNING, Christian Stemmler revisits this uncertain yet fertile moment through his own photographs, a collection that functions less as documentation and more as a lived memory of transformation. His images trace a city and a generation in motion: nights that blur into mornings, fleeting friendships, and rooms filled with both exhaustion and desire.

What began as a private act, taking photographs without purpose or audience, has turned almost three decades later into a visual testimony of an era that feels distant and yet strangely familiar. Stemmler’s images were made instinctively, without a sense of belonging to a photographic discourse. They emerged from daily life: improvised portraits on wrinkled bedsheets, snapshots in smoky clubs, fragments of faces and gestures captured on public transport or in shared flats. In their unpolished immediacy, they reveal a city that was still learning to breathe again, open, unpredictable, and porous.

Viewed today, these photographs are more than remnants of youth; they are fragments of a collective state of mind. They show Berlin before it was redefined by capital and global attention, when chaos and creativity existed side by side and possibility seemed endless. Stemmler’s return to these negatives—scanning, revisiting, remembering—becomes a quiet act of excavation. It is less about looking back than about reconnecting with a time, a feeling, and the reasons one begins to create in the first place.

ANFANG / BEGINNING unfolds as both remembrance and renewal. It reflects the vitality of a city that has always been a projection surface for ideas of freedom, and it marks the reawakening of an artist who once set the camera aside. The images resist nostalgia; instead, they evoke a form of sincerity that feels rare today, a closeness to life that is neither curated nor composed. Stemmler’s Berlin was rough, direct, and unguarded. His photographs preserve that atmosphere, allowing it to linger: the noise of a night that never really ended, and the quiet that always followed.

The second edition of ANFANG / BEGINNING: BERLIN 1994–99 will be launched on November 6, 2025, at Voo Store, Oranienstraße 24, Berlin — an opportunity to experience Stemmler’s work in direct conversation with the spirit of its time and to immerse oneself in the atmosphere of a Berlin that no longer exists.

Temple of Love: Rick Owens’ Sacred Rebellion

Anna Klusmeier — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:08:59 +0000

Words by Nicole Atieno

Images by OWENSCORP/HARRY MILLER

Berlin is showing its usual cold and dark winter side this October evening, but inside the newly opened Rick Owens store, the energy shifts. The line is long, a steady stream of fans, each waiting for Rick to sign their copy of Temple of Love, techno music shakes the walls, while topless male models in towering boots glide through the crowd, serving drinks like ceremonial attendants. It feels less like a book signing and more like a ceremony, something between a club night and a sacred gathering.

Even in the noise, time seems to slow around Rick. Calm, deliberate, magnetic. He’s here for the launch of Temple of Love, the book released alongside his exhibition at the Palais Galliera in Paris (June 28, 2025 – January 4, 2026). But when we sit down to talk, he doesn’t start with the book. He starts with a story.

“My friend Christeene was performing at Berghain one night,” he says. “Before the music started, I was just wandering around alone, taking pictures. Then the DJ began sound-checking and played Detroit Rock City by KISS. I was alone on the dance floor, dancing to KISS. That was the only time I ever went to Berghain. It was perfect.”

It’s an image that could only belong to Rick Owens. Alone, euphoric, caught between the spiritual and the surreal. I ask if he’s ever been tempted to go back; he simply says, no.

“Why would I? I love dancing sober, sometimes in Paris, I wake up at 2 a.m., have an espresso, and go out dance for a bit. Dancing is the simplest expression of joy. I almost feel a moral duty to do it.”

That moral duty to express joy sits at the heart of Temple of Love. The book unfolds less like an archive and more like a journey, tracing not just the evolution of Owens’ work, but the process behind it: the experiments, the inspirations, and the stories shared by those closest to him.

Each section maps a different facet of his world; Sacrality, Hollywood, Fortuny, The Joy of Decadence, Paradox of the Sexes, Tenderness, Sculptural Confrontation fragments of an ongoing search for beauty and meaning.

Inside the book, Courtney Love recalls how she met Rick, like a scene from a lost 90s film: she remembers walking past his Hollywood studio and seeing him “like a sorcerer at his cauldron.” Jo-Ann Furniss follows with A Manifesto for Subversion, tracing his journey from underground L.A. to the cinematic chaos of his 2025 Hollywood show.

“I had every page of Temple of Love pinned to my gym wall at home for a year,” he tells me. “I’d move them around between workouts. It became a living map of my life. I don’t think I’ll ever take it down.”

For Rick Owens, creation is never separate from daily life. The gym, the studio, the book, they’re all extensions of the same ritual.

When I ask what drove him to make this book now, his answer turns philosophical:

“The older I get, the more I realize my purpose is to reject disapproval and celebrate spaces free of malicious judgment. That’s why I use pentagrams, they represent otherness that’s been condemned. Malicious judgment is what creates wars. I try to counterbalance that by being exuberantly decadent, exuberantly perverse.”

For Rick Owens, rebellion is an act of care, a refusal to participate in shame.

“I love beauty,” he continues. “Even traditional beauty. I just like to make it flexible, maybe even grotesque. I’m not trying to destroy beauty. I’m trying to expand it.”

“People might think it’s odd when I have these models topless here at this occasion but it’s not about sex, I want that feeling of a riot.”

That brought us to the question that has been at the center of this conversation: what does love mean in Temple of Love?

“Love is energy,” he says. “When you push a word like love into the world, it’s good energy. People assume my world is dystopian, but it’s not, it’s realistic. The title also comes from that Sisters of Mercy song I loved when I was young. Fashion, to me, is communication. It’s how we connect.”

That idea of connection as sacred, radiates through the book. Beneath the stillness of Owens’ work lies tenderness: the quiet joy of self-expression, the courage to be unashamed.

“I love book signings,” he smiles. “It’s like having a huge birthday party every few months.”

In the end, Temple of Love is Rick Owens’ journey of form, beauty as resistance, vulnerability as strength.

As Rick steps out to begin the signing, the energy in the room shifts. His community is already lined up, a long queue of devotees clutching the same white book, Temple of Love with Michèle Lamy gazing the cover. Michèle herself moves through the crowd with her usual magnetic grace. Some fans manage to steal a quick selfie with her, others share a few whispered words as she signs their copies too.

TO WATCH – HALLOWEEN EDITION: “CAT PEOPLE” BY JACQUES TOURNEUR

Anna Klusmeier — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:29:47 +0000

Cats have long been linked to darkness. Black cats in particular carry the stigma of bad luck and disobedience. Their image has repeatedly been associated with femininity, not as a compliment, but as a warning. Traits like danger, deceit, and seduction have been projected onto them, turning the cat into a coded symbol of female independence, and the fear it provokes.

In Cat People (1942), Jacques Tourneur tells the story of Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian artist living in New York. She believes she is bound by an ancient curse, doomed to turn into a panther whenever passion awakens within her. To protect the man she loves, she must suppress what feels most alive within her. Every kiss could awaken the beast and destroy everything she longs to hold onto. Bound by superstition, she lives outside Christian virtue, destined to sin.

The film is less about the childhood trauma caused by fairy tales and more a dark fairy tale in itself. Through quiet gestures and subtle symbols, Tourneur creates an atmosphere of unease in which disbelief surrounds Irena, yet every panther-shaped shadow seems to confirm her reality.

At its core, Cat People is an intimate story about the dread of one’s own desires. It explores the weight of female repression in a patriarchal world, how society demands control over passion, and the collision between modernity and lingering superstition. Irena’s fear embodies the horror of intimacy, the cost of restraint, and the struggle to exist in a world that will neither fully understand nor accept her.