The January Cold and Everyone’s Best Coat

Berlin Fashion Week in January has a quality that larger fashion cities don’t quite replicate: the cold keeps things honest. Nobody is doing resort wear or pretending the weather is something it isn’t. The designers showing here tend to be younger, working in that interesting zone between concept and wearable, and the street photography around the venues gets genuinely good for a few days. There’s a particular tension between what people wore to be photographed and what the temperature actually demanded, and that gap produces some unexpectedly great layering.

It’s a smaller event than Paris or Milan, which is mostly an advantage. The scale is still human. You can actually be present at things, rather than watching from a credentialed distance. Whether that intimacy can survive the event’s gradual growth is a question Berlin has been asking for years without quite resolving it.