Nobody Here Actually Wants to Be Here
Nobody at Berlin Fashion Week actually wants to be at Berlin Fashion Week. I know this because I was dragged to that circus for five years running by various people with various agendas, and the one constant—through every show, every after-party, every snow-dusted courtyard between venues—was collective, barely-suppressed misery.
The designers were irritated because the front rows of their shows had been filled with soap opera extras and minor reality TV faces. Those faces were irritated because nobody was photographing them. The models were irritated for reasons they weren’t allowed to express. The agency staff were irritated about the overtime. The event managers were irritated because every third attendee was conducting themselves like the reincarnation of some great fashion legend. The journalists were irritated because their interview slots had been traded away to bloggers. The bloggers were irritated because it was snowing.
I was irritated because I could have been at home eating croquettes and broccoli in cream sauce, sitting in my underwear watching Adventure Time and Regular Show.
Fashion Week creates—or attracts, it’s hard to say which—a very specific type of person. Usually someone with a small blog who has just received an invitation to an irrelevant runway show, and something about that invitation has severed the tether keeping them connected to reality. They arrive in Berlin with sunglasses inappropriate for the weather, wearing an outfit assembled from the nearest fast-fashion chain, and spend the entire week hovering outside white tents waiting for a street-style photographer to notice them. They stack their press bags inside each other so as not to miss a single free deodorant sample. They take notes in little notebooks. Their 52 followers are, they’re certain, waiting urgently for exclusive dispatches from the capital.
Viewed from a sufficient distance, Fashion Week is just a machinery for giving the fashion industry permission to exist. Designers need press. Press needs advertising. Advertising needs the shows to happen. It holds together only as long as everyone keeps holding hands around the commercial bonfire, and the moment any part of the chain stops pretending it matters, the whole thing resolves into what it actually is: thousands of people performing importance in a very cold city.
Whether you play along isn’t always your choice. But if none of Berlin’s fashion representatives had any interest in you or your work—and statistically, they didn’t—then you were handed a gift. You didn’t have to waddle between snow-covered courtyards. You didn’t have to drink warm sparkling wine at promotional events and smile at strangers you’ll never see again. You didn’t have to be relentlessly pleasant about everything to everyone for a week straight.
You could have stayed home with the croquettes and the broccoli and the cream sauce. You could have watched Adventure Time in your underwear. Everyone at Fashion Week was envying you, and they were too cold and too tired to admit it.