Six Outfits and a Crown

iHeartBerlin ran a vintage fashion competition in summer 2011, and it felt precisely calibrated to that specific moment in the city’s self-image—when Berlin still believed its thrift-store aesthetic was simultaneously a political stance and genuinely good style, and wasn’t entirely wrong about either. Two contestants: Helen Arend, a Berliner with the kind of scrappy confidence the city exports as personality, and Isabelle Åström, a Swede who understood that Scandinavian restraint and Berlin chaos are more compatible than they look. Three outfits each, presented in a Facebook album that has since dissolved into the internet. The winner got to walk a runway at a wedding dress show in July. Whether that’s a prize or a sentence probably depends on your relationship to wedding dresses.