A Party Where You Know Every Name

A party where every face you see is one you recognize is a specific pleasure—not networking, not obligation, just the easy sociability where nobody needs to introduce themselves to anyone and the drinks go down without effort. That was the mood at the AXE Black shirt release one Tuesday night, with Joko Winterscheidt (Germany’s most reliably entertaining television personality, equal parts comedian and provocateur), Eva Padberg, and the Dandy Diary crew all in one room, eating black food and photographing each other with their phones.

The occasion was a black t-shirt. Joko had designed one in collaboration with his label German Garment, built around the concept of understatement: fashion should match your personality and underline it, not cover it up. This is a reasonable thing to believe about clothes, and it sounds best when the person saying it is charming. Joko is charming. The shirt was a plain black t-shirt. These observations don’t require further analysis.

There’s something clarifying about a room full of people who’ve all independently arrived at black as their final answer. Whether that’s genuine conviction or just Berlin operating at its aesthetic default is impossible to say.