Boris Bidjan Saberi: Human Scale

“I am at a stage in my profession where I have expertise, like a tailor or a mechanic. I know something,” Boris Bidjan Saberi, the German fashion designer, said during a preview of his collection on a recent morning in June. It was a rare interview that, as someone who prefers to let his work speak for itself, Saberi agreed to. He paused a beat, “I mean, in the end, I don’t know anything,” laughter all around. “I love to work and get better and make things different. My whole life I have worked with my hands.” 

Saberi’s gallery store, atelier and production facility are located in the semi-industrial expanse of Barcelona’s Sant Marti district, known as the Catalan Manchester, about a half-hour taxi ride from the city center. Saberi occupies two floors of a sprawling red brick warehouse complex accessed through a driveway gate.

The gallery store is by appointment only and one of Saberi’s staff was waiting to collect me and my teenage daughter inside the gate. We were ushered up several flights and into a high-ceilinged, windowed expanse where the Spring Summer 2025 collection was arrayed by color and garment type.

Saberi has no use for fashion intellectualizing. A “concept” for him is taking two pieces of trim, stitching them together to form a loop system to be used in lieu of traditional seams, and having that inform his patternmaking. From working out the initial design of a garment by tailoring it on his own body to the final step when the silver-tipped tag is attached by hand, his garments are intended as objects in and of the world. And like all objects crafted with care, they are imbued with a certain presence and possess subtle details that do not reproduce easily in a jpeg or on Instagram.

His hope is that you get to experience his garments in person and that maybe you will be drawn to make them a part of your life. He is quick to acknowledge that he is grappling with a challenge neither unique nor exclusive to his business, yet one nonetheless very real and seemingly unresolvable, which is how to present his “slow-cooked” clothes and convey the value therein to a world blinkered by social media, numbed by rapid-fire spectacle, and over-reliant on ecommerce. This dilemma, how to operate by artisanal principles, that demand handwork and limited production, in the fashion system that demands scale and spectacle, has so far proved unsolvable. Saberi stopped showing in Paris after Fall Winter 2020, having rejected runway shows as the only yardstick of success. As he explained in another interview, the pressure of “what to present” eclipsed “‘I have to present this.” Saberi hasn’t ruled out returning to Paris, but only if what he wants to say demands it. Until then he wants to step back and focus on doing the perfect garment, elaborating within his “extremely tight circle” of ideas, writing and rewriting, if you will. These days his atelier doubles as his showroom, where he presents new collections to a handful of buyers who fly to Barcelona specifically to do their buy.

Upstairs, in the cool, candle-scented store, my daughter had zeroed in on a faded gray t-shirt from the new collection, and while I had one arm in the sleeve of a black SUIT5 work jacket Saberi bounded in, dressed in a black t-shirt and shorts, unruly hair pulled back in a bun. We gathered by the bent steel gallery store desk — Saberi and three members of his sales and communications staff, Blanca, Carla and Christina — and he launched into it. 

“This [brand] started in 2005. The only Internet that was in our range was StyleZeitgeist, as a forum where you could share information and which also was a big help for me because it was how we communicated.” In addition to the forum, he was cold-emailing PDF lookbooks to shops. “But,” Saberi took pains to point out, “the shops had no Internet page. So you didn’t buy via the internet, yet.”

From the beginning Saberi has been against e-commerce because, as he put it, gesturing at the room full of intricately made clothing, “We thought, ‘How will you understand this, and smell it and touch it and know what we do, digitally?”

Saberi recounted the glory days of the early aughts when buyers from shops with strong voices “came in and were emotionally touched.” That all changed with the rise of e-commerce, which has not been kind to designers who, like Saberi, concentrate on the minute details of construction. And as menswear moved towards streetwear, the original customer that supported designers like Saberi also disappeared. And on the Internet faking it has become easy. Anyone can start a brand, stitch a handful of garments together and call it “artisanal.”

Saberi thinks that the Internet is not just about faking it, but also about flaking it. “It comes back to this point again, that there’s a crisis, in which people don’t really know what they want. They don’t know which values or which senses are theirs. Today this and tomorrow that.” On the flip side many of his customers display the kind of loyalty that is the envy of any designer who cares about what he does.

Saberi’s company has about 30 employees. They produce nearly everything on site. (You can get behind the scenes in this BBC Iran documentary.) I asked Saberi to what extent he teaches the design team to cut or finish in the house style and after a short pause he answered, “There are a lot of things which are still on me.” He meant this literally; Saberi first works the garment on his own body and from that tailored garment a pattern is developed.

Take the P13 pant, a Saberi mainstay. “It’s a Levi’s vintage jean which I transformed on my body over six, seven years by stitching it [to make it more fitted] and opening it and putting fabrics in it [to create volume]. So I changed the pants while using them. Then from that pattern I would decide where to put the lines. And then I cut the new pattern on new fabric. And then I again changed the pattern, but now the adaptation or the perfecting of the pattern was on the new pants. This is how I still work.”

The Spring Summer ‘25 collection continues prior seasons’ direction of proposing more volume in the pants, either in the cuts or via strap and lacing systems that allow the wearer to play with fit and drape. The suits are tailored and mostly sharp in silhouette, offered in both single and double-breasted versions, with matching vest bags, loose pants or shorts in black, gray or stone. New this season was a capsule of raw Japanese denim with iron buttons. The impetus here was to present one fabric in its purest form, leaving the material untouched, the opposite of the highly involved process that Saberi puts every garment through by dyeing, washing, and molding it. 

What makes Saberi’s signature unique is that there is never a whiff of retro, no thematic moodboards scraped from the first few pages of Pinterest or a Google image search. His world is undeniably of his own making. “My creative standpoint is always more like an artist, because I want to transmit and manifest something about the world and about my place in it,” says Saberi. He grabbed a light jacket with adjustable straps off the rack to illustrate, ”Maybe the transition today is more in a direction where the wearer can play a bit more with volume. You can be your own stylist. It’s the whole story of society to me right now, adaptation. Finding our own system to survive.”

Part of the reason why Saberi is so involved in the design and production of every garment is deeply personal. “My style was born when I was fourteen and skateboarding, listening to hip-hop and punk rock. I was always a skinny boy who did extreme sports. The garments I could buy didn’t look good on me. So I bought second-hand stuff and transformed it. And then basically it happened that friends of mine asked me, ‘I want that, can you make me one?’ And I said, ‘No.’ Not because I couldn’t: they had a different body, so I didn’t know where to start.”

But the desire to make clothes for others stayed with Saberi and eventually drove him to study fashion design. Still, the idea of what Saberi calls “3D patterning,” working straight on the body, has remained central to his work. So has the idea of artisanal production. Saberi acknowledged that his clothes are expensive, but he went to great pains to explain why; the runs are limited, the fabrics and trimmings are top notch, the process is labor intensive, and he pays his workers fair wages. This does not allow for economies of scale, nor would he want to scale. Scaling to him feels inhuman. “A friend of mine is a textile designer and sometimes sells fabrics to these big monsters,” says Saberi. “They can sell one million meters of one fabric for one model of pants. One million meters would not even fit into our entire space. Of course those pants can cost 90 euros in the shop. I pay just for stitching one pant maybe 60 or 80 euros.” 

“I mean, that was also different before,” Saberi, who still pays upwards of 20 euros per meter of fabric, which is uncommonly expensive, replied when I asked about how he sources his materials. “Some of the amazing fabric factories I purchased my fabrics from, they died. But others survived. They are passionate about what they do, because, if not, they would not do it because it makes no sense [financially]. The big garment companies don’t buy their fabrics because they want it cheap and quick.” 

“It’s amazing,” Saberi said, almost thinking out loud at this point, “how we all fight on. We’re like a small army. Thanks to them,” Saberi said, looking over at his employees. “I really feel honored to have this team.” 

At this point in the tape I can’t recognize which of Saberi’s colleagues spoke up, but in a way it’s OK because it’s almost like she was speaking for everyone in the room. She said, “It is important to share our values and this kind of mindset because you can maybe affect other people. And maybe they think that the world is too big and that they’re nothing, but you are affecting so many lives. It’s something.”