Marcel Winatschek

Berlin Dressed Up and Tried

For a few days every summer the city would stop pretending it didn’t care about appearances. The international fashion circus rolled in and Berlin—that perpetually underdressed, self-consciously cool capital—would submit to it with something between reluctant pride and barely concealed excitement. Summer 2010 was one of those weeks.

Calvin Klein showed. Michael Michalsky showed. Marcel Ostertag showed. The official face of the event was Milla Jovovich, which is exactly the casting choice a city makes when it wants to seem more interesting than Paris without actually competing with Paris. Zombie slayer as fashion ambassador. It worked.

The real action was never behind the velvet ropes anyway. Berlin’s Fashion Week always had this democratic overflow—free events, underground showcases, the whole city performing a slightly elevated version of itself for exactly five days. Beautiful people everywhere, and then the week ended and everyone went back to the hoodies and the Club-Mate and the pretending not to care.