When Fashion Gets Sick of Itself

The official Berlin Fashion Week has been trying to compete with Paris and Milan for years, which is a race it cannot win and probably shouldn’t want to win. The result is predictable: the same faces filling the same front rows, television personalities sitting next to buyers while both pretend the other belongs there, models making their turns while everyone backstage quietly loses their mind. Fashion weeks at this level stop being about clothes somewhere around the second day and become about the production of content about themselves.

In October 2014, an alternative fashion week set up in and around the eWerk in Berlin. Young labels—Lady Gonzales, TZUJI, Jylle Navarro—presented their work alongside talks and the kind of mixed programming that at least pretended fashion might have something to say beyond its own display. The founder, Adam Rose, described Berlin as a city of freethinkers and contrarians, which is half true and half civic boosterism, but the impulse behind the whole thing was sound.

The question these events always have to answer is whether the alternative scene actually wants to exist outside the system or just wants better seats inside it. Fashion rebels who dream of being acquired by a luxury conglomerate aren’t rebels; they’re people waiting for the right offer. The best version of an alternative fashion week doesn’t try to replace the official one—it tries to make the official one look small.

Whether the Berlin Alternative Fashion Week managed that, or kept managing it after that first October, I’m less certain. But the city has always had more interesting ideas about what to wear than any official schedule has ever acknowledged.