After seven years of running her Berlin-based fashion brand, Melisa Minca is walking away. For Minca, the decision is the culmination of a slow, sobering realisation: building a business that is truly ethical – from production to politics – is, in her words, “impossible”. “I really deluded myself that somehow this will work forever,” she says. “It even crossed my mind that I’d be famous one day … Progressively, I realised that that’s definitely not what I want.”
I think the business model was always flawed because I was always trying to live by my values, and I was failing.
The Slovakian-born designer moved to Berlin in 2015 and has since made a name for herself in Berlin’s fashion scene. Working out of her flat-cum-studio in Friedrichshain, Minca makes each garment by hand out of upcycled materials, crafting tops made of old gloves and belts, corsets made out of repurposed fringes and shoe laces, and trousers made out of lingerie.
She has two Berlin Fashion Weeks and three shows under her belt. Since founding her eponymous brand in 2018, Minca has amassed nearly 25,000 followers on Instagram and has dressed local legends such as Iranian-American singer Dornika and Egyptian-German actress Tua El-Fawwal.
The 34-year-old’s career is characterised by a sense of anarchy, even from the beginning. Minca, who grew up in Bratislava, moved to Scotland at the age of 20 to study sustainable development and politics, but spent her university days launching and writing her own fashion blog.
She did her master’s thesis on the sustainability, or lack thereof, of the fashion industry in her home country. “I looked into the textile industry that used to exist in Slovakia, and how it’s being basically destroyed by offshoring and outsourcing … that’s when I realised that all this fast fashion was just bullshit,” she says. “When I arrived in Berlin, I was unemployed. I had all this time, so I just taught myself how to sew.”
Minca’s designs are impossible to ignore: reflective prints, often emblazoned onto business-style suits, with slogans such as ‘‘Pay me” and “The only ethical consumption is eating ass”. Of all her work, one line stands out: “‘Suck my clit’ is just iconic. I have a bunch of stuff with this print” she says. “I love wearing that, especially to places where people wouldn’t expect it … once people read it, it’s this little moment of [realisation] but they can’t tell you shit because it looks presentable.”
Her political commitment runs deeper than provocative slogans. In 2023, choreographer Jouana Samia approached the designer about creating costumes for a performance responding to the attacks on Gaza. “[This was] quite fresh into the most recent chapter of the ongoing genocide – and she wanted to obviously make a statement,” Minca says.
“She got eight dancers from her crew to perform, so I made a bunch of outfits just from the keffiyeh. It was really powerful.” Minca was serious about getting it right, even watching multiple documentaries to understand the meaning of the garment in its different colours and forms. Then, late last year, she created a keffiyeh dress for El-Fawwal.
“She came to me because she had seen that I worked with the keffiyeh before and she needed a red carpet dress. Obviously, I said yes.” No money was ever exchanged; instead, the two agreed that Minca would rent it out in the future to anyone else who wanted to make a pro-Palestine fashion statement.
Minca has always seen her craft as a platform for political expression, but it’s become increasingly challenging. In February, Minca presented her final Berlin Fashion Week show, ‘(R)evolution Irresistible’, inspired by Adrienne Maree Brown’s 2019 book Pleasure Activism.
“This is also what really jump-started this journey of unraveling the brand,” she explains. “[There’s] a quote that I found in the book from [American writer] Toni Cade Bambara. She said that, ‘The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.’”
In that spirit, Minca applied for funding from Fashion Council Germany to produce the show, but was denied. The rejection didn’t come as a complete surprise; the show dealt openly with themes of solidarity with Palestine – a move that likely sealed her exclusion from funding pipelines. “The Fashion Council is this body that, as they say, supports young talent in the city – which I don’t believe they really do … they support you if it aligns with the government’s narrative,” she says.
“I was hoping someone on the selection team would say, ‘Yes, we should support this.’ Maybe someone did. But we still didn’t get [the funding].” Minca financed the show through crowdfunding and out of her own pocket, paying her team and the models by gifting them garments and the little that was raised: “I lost money, obviously, but I didn’t do this for the money.”
The incident is part of a wider pattern she’s observed: Berlin positions itself as a city of radicalism, but when artists get too radical, the support dries up. “I think Berlin Fashion Week could be way more successful, even from the business standpoint, if they only realise that they should support the political part … standing up, activism, being loud, being expressive about injustice and complicity.”
Stepping away from the brand hasn’t been an easy decision for Minca. She wanted her brand to exist, but not the way that business is traditionally done. “My unwillingness to do it how it’s [currently] done, my unwillingness to continuously exploit people: it all meant that I was struggling with growing,” she says. “I think the business model was always flawed because I was always trying to live by my values, and I was failing.”
When she’d apply for funding, she was consistently met with the same barrier: someone on the other end of the application asking, “How will you scale the business?” “I am not interested in scaling this. I just wanted some money to set up shop, to hire a bunch of people and we break even…. Everybody gets paid fairly, and we keep using discarded materials because that’s important,” she explains. “Then [I] just had the realisation, like, fuck, okay, what I want to do, there is absolutely no way of doing that.”
Minca also had to come to terms with another tough reality: “I don’t want to sell stuff that no one needs. I honestly believe that whoever is starting [a fashion brand] right now should really think deep and hard about whether they want to spend their days doing something that helps no one.”
To top it off, rents are up, spaces for creative work are vanishing and the energy that once made the city feel like a haven is fading. “I’m still in my living room, even though I wanted to get a shop once upon a time,” she tells me. When asked what her greatest achievement has been, she half-jokes, “Having a roof over my head.”
Her next move? Athens. “I thought, if we only have 10 years on this planet, I might as well be somewhere where I want to be,” she says, adding that that’s somewhere “warm enough”. But she hasn’t ruled out a move back to Berlin, or to her family in Slovakia – or even to the brand she’s leaving behind. “If it ever comes back, it’ll be more of a collective, not just me. We wouldn’t sell stuff … I really enjoyed workshops, skill transfer – things with real value, not materialistic value.”
To young artists and designers considering starting their own brands, she has one piece of advice: “No one needs another fashion brand. Everybody has enough clothes, and I understand you want to express yourself and your art and all of this, but this is just absolutely not what the world needs right now.”
