Free Currywurst and the Frankfurt Fashion Crowd

Frankfurt surprises people who’ve written it off as a city you pass through on the way somewhere else. Berlin takes all the cultural oxygen, Munich takes the money, Hamburg takes the cool—Frankfurt gets the finance district and a lot of unfair dismissal. But a fashion night in a decent venue with an open bar and live swing music has its own gravitational logic regardless of geography.

GQ co-hosted an evening billed as a "Lifestyle & Fashion Night" and the room had the texture of a party that doesn’t want to admit it’s a party—people in calibrated clusters, holding glasses, performing mild disinterest while quietly cataloguing everything around them.

Three models—Karina, Ariane, and Angelika—moved through the room under the theme "Head over Heels," meaning accessories: evening gowns, sharp jeans, biker jackets, the small finishing pieces that complete an outfit’s argument. Shermine Shahrivar was there and enthusiastically fluent in all of it. Hardy Krüger Jr. made a point I keep returning to: that accessories reveal character more precisely than clothing does. He’s not wrong. A man’s watch and his shoes will tell you more about him than his job title ever will. The musician Dave Kaufmann smiled continuously near the stage—either professional habit or genuine contentment, impossible to say.

The best thing at the event was the currywurst. A stand called Best Worscht had set up near the back and I ate an amount I won’t be specifying. There is something right about high-fashion posturing and a paper tray of sausage existing in the same room. Frankfurt understood the brief.