The Aesthetic of Understatement: Berlin Fashion Week
By Amanda Rodriguez
As I walked confusedly down Wilhelmstraße, the street where Berlin Fashion Week takes place, it became evident that the international fashion event is not as big a phenomenon as New York’s Fashion Week.
There was a small 8’ x 10’ sign at the address listed on my online invitation that said “BFW [Berlin Fashion Week] 400 m down the street.” It took my colleague and I a few minutes to figure out what direction to head because there were next to no advertisements and little foot traffic leading to the event, which I found surprising, given how popular such events are back in the United States.
After circling the street for several minutes amid the many Berliners trying to get to their destinations, I spotted a woman who was dressed in a chic and stylish street ensemble. I approached her and asked if she knew where the fashion venue was.
To my surprise, she was a fellow Californian named Emmalynn, who currently studies at UC Irvine, and she just so happens to be a fashion model with a large following on Instagram. Her home is Berlin, and as we walked together to the event, she described how much the fashion scene has changed over time.
“This event has shrunk so much, it used to be really popular, but it’s nothing like the New York or Paris Fashion Week, and people don’t really pay attention to it here anymore,” Emmalynn said.
Melissa Drier, Berlin correspondent for the fashion news service Women’s Wear Daily, says the decline of Berlin’s status as a fashion hub can be blamed on a lack of education among local residents. “The public knows nothing about fashion. It’s the blind leading the blind,” she said, adding that social media is a culprit in how it showcases “current trends” in fashion.
Still, I was excited to enter the venue and take my seat in the front row for the ready-to-wear show by the German designer pair Jale Richert and Michele Beil. The setting was intimate with a long, grey, narrow runway that ended in front of a cluster of photographers ready to snap their golden shots of the show.
A video that opened the show announced that the creations would be “full of esteem for the ecological environment.” Richert explained onscreen that the designs were in line with improving the conditions of the earth to help reverse climate change. The pieces were to highlight simplicity in fashion, expressing the notion that clothes can be worn time after time and not thrown away after several uses.
The lights began to turn on with a slight dimmer effect, one by one, and the audience respectfully clapped and brought out cell phones to video the show.
In the video, which continued to play above the runaway behind the models to an operatic score, we saw the designers take turns shaving each others heads. When the individual models walked out, we saw they also had the same shaved haircut style.
This startling feature drew attention to the accessories worn by the models, which included earrings or rings onto which locks of hair from the designers had been inserted — an unsettling feeling for me as I imagined wearing that.
The models, with serious expressions, headed down the runway in plaid suits, and un-contoured dresses and coats that were not at all attractive to my eye — all in dull or drab colors. An up-cycled product was the center of attraction of the collection: an oversized coat sewn from over 100 black bras that came from old inventories of a laundry manufacturer.
Fashion Week ran from Monday through Saturday, by invitation only. I am no fashion expert and admit it was hard for me to digest the message and styles that were presented to the public. Richert and Beil did a lot of things differently in their collection, with some experimental innovations that don’t easily come to my mind when I think of a major European city’s Fashion Week.
The designers made unisex and gender-free fashion. The title of the collection was “Unscharf” which means blurry, or out of focus. But I would have appreciated more color and artistic flourish for the 2020 Spring/Summer collection.
UC Santa Barbara journalism students are reporting from Berlin for feature articles which will be published here later in July. Meanwhile, they are blogging from the city about their travel and journalism experiences.
