Marcel Winatschek

Free Drinks, Baby

The Closed afterparty was at the Monkey Bar in the 25hours Hotel, which was as close as I ever got to the actual Fashion Week. Haute Couture and I don’t speak the same language, so I’d skipped the runways and gone straight for the free drinks. It seemed simpler that way.

Leni, Meltem, Anna, Lauri, and Sabrina were already there. We knew some people from the Adidas and Reebok teams, but after the first round, all of that stopped mattering. The conversations took over—the kind that only happen when a crowd has sorted itself and nobody’s performing anymore. The real Fashion Week, the runways and the models and the whole machine, was somewhere else in Berlin. We weren’t missing it.

You could do Fashion Week like this every year and be satisfied. Good people, cold drinks, halloumi wraps if you’re lucky. I live in Berlin anyway, so there’s no dramatic goodbye—everyone leaves, everyone comes back. That’s the cycle. The parties are better when the city fills up with people again, even if you’re only there because the drinks are free and it beats staying home.