Gold Reserves

Berlin Fashion Week in July runs on bare skin and the specific creative ambition that happens when designers are let loose in a city that doesn’t entirely take itself seriously. C.neeon worked the courtyard of the Picknick Club with oversized pastel-printed bedsheet pieces that should have looked ridiculous and somehow didn’t. Kaviar Gauche sent silk and chiffon down the runway like a half-remembered dream. Frida Weyer went full sepia romanticism with evening dresses from another century, and that restraint felt more interesting than most of what else was on offer.

The thing that actually made me stop wasn’t on any runway. A writer named Teresa Bücker had contributed an essay to the fashion week magazine DERZEIT about what she called the year’s most secret and shimmering trend: women with red hair. She wrote about her own: The daily reminders of the gold reserves on my head just constantly renew my safe exoticism. This feature, to which I am constantly reduced by others, has become my personal obsession. I read it twice. That phrase—"gold reserves"—is better than anything most fashion writers produce in an entire season.

The evening I was actually looking forward to was Michael Michalsky’s StyleNite, which had a reputation for going sideways in the best possible way. On the lineup: the British label Maharishi and the team from Berlin’s Friedrichstadtpalast presenting their couture looks from the revue show Yma. The afterparty promised OMD mid-revival, opera singer Nadja Michael, and DJ Hell. That combination had no business making sense together, which was precisely why I needed to be there.