16 February, 2010
Fashion by c.neeon, Berlin
Did you know that Germany is a major fashion centre? Some people find that surprising. Yet loyal customers, outstanding designers and the creative powerhouse of Berlin make that possible. Insights into Germany as a land of fashion.
German fashion relies on individuality, expression and character, is sometimes witty, sometimes elegant. German designers achieve success abroad and German fashion labels attract customers with quality products. And the Berlin look has a magnetic attraction for trend scouts.
By Joachim Schirrmacher
Christopher Bailey says, “Germans enjoy fashion.” And the Briton should know. As head designer at Burberry he is one of the best in his field and also knows Germany very well as he lived many years in Munich and Trier.
Yet Germans do not only enjoy fashion, they also design it with considerable competence. Members of the international premier league include Karl Lagerfeld (Chanel), Jil Sander, Tomas Mair (Bottega Veneta) and Wolfgang Joop (Wunderkind). Furthermore, German fashion designers work in almost all international fashion companies, often in leading positions, and therefore leave a decisive mark on fashion in Paris, London and New York.
Jeans instead of Costumes
Germans’ enjoyment of fashion is also proven by a recent study. Between May 2008 and April 2009 the German Fashion Institute photographed more than 5,000 passers-by aged between 20 and 35 years on the streets of Berlin, Cologne, Bielefeld and London. “The look found on German streets has totally changed in the last ten years – and not only in Berlin, it is surprisingly similar in all the surveyed German cities,” says project leader Elke Giese. She has summed up the observations in six theses:
1. Rather than suits, sportswear and streetwear are worn over 90% of the time – even to important work meetings. Great care is taken in presenting this seemingly casual attire.
2. The creativity and individuality of “self-designs” are more important than the status symbols of established luxury brands.
3. Influences from sport and sportswear are entering and changing every area of clothing. Jeans are omnipresent. Today even formal attire has to have casual elements to appear modern.
4. Women’s very feminine clothing is juxtaposed with contrasting messages such as boots or denim jackets.
5. The new fashion victims are male. Men’s fashion competence is surprising. Alongside an emphatically functional style of clothing, men maintain a playful attitude towards brands, colours and accessories.
6. Increasingly often new fashions are worn on the street before they are seen on the catwalk.
Found the future of fashion in Berlin
This study is so interesting because it demonstrates that German fashion has its own identity. It is not defined in the design studio, but in everyday life. Fashion is seen as a means of personal expression. Contemporary German fashion focuses on independent designs that catch the spirit of the 21st century. Rather than focusing on sophisticated ladies, today it is aimed at job nomads, emancipation and reconciling a family and a career. The focus is on “urban wear”. This new fashion future is primarily found in Berlin. “Ostentation is embarrassing here, because harmony should prevail between clothing and wearer,” writes Klaus Heine, member of academic staff at the Technical University Berlin, in the study “Is Berlin Luxury the Future Luxury?”.
The largest fashion fairs are held in Germany
Germany is better known for its leading role in fashion as a consumer product. With sales of 59.9 billion euros, the country is the second largest market in the world and has one of the most powerful clothing industries. Certainly, the fashion professionals order, evaluate and photograph creations at the shows of the big designers in Paris, Milan and New York. But they are concerned primarily with image. In Germany the main thing is business and it is also where the largest fashion fairs are held. In the 1970s and 1980s people went to Düsseldorf and Cologne for ladies’ and men’s wear and jeans. Today Munich and Berlin are important for sportswear and streetwear. This change reflects changed dressing habits. There are few markets worldwide that are as strongly rooted in sport fashion, streetwear and casual wear as the German market.
The lead comes from the ispo sporting articles fair in Munich and the Bread & Butter streetwear fair in Berlin. Both are leading international trade shows.
Established in 2001, Bread & Butter is the internationally leading fair for streetwear and urban wear. Even Justin Timberlake comes here to present his own fashion label. It is a crowd puller and an important economic factor with an estimated turn over of 100 million euros per fair.
What is more it is attracting many other trade shows and events – not least the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin, which is organized by the American IMG Group. It offers an international catwalk and the great media interest has forced businesses to ensure their presentations are of an international standard. At the same time, service infrastructure has evolved and a landscape of small, individual fashion shops has opened in the Berlin-Mitte district.
Germany‘s fashion shop window
During the 1990s the Soho district of New York was a magnet for trend scouts. Today they are also attracted to Berlin. Although the commercial centre of the West German fashion industry was located around Düsseldorf following the Second World War and Munich became another important centre of the fashion trade, in the meantime Berlin has asserted itself as the leading German fashion metropolis, as Germany‘s fashion shop window.
Berlin is Europes Capital of Creativity
“Forget Paris and London,” wrote Time in 2004, “Berlin is the new capital of creative inspiration.” Berlin offers – also thanks to its low living costs – freedom of thought, emotion and action, the prerequisite for creativity. “In London, Paris or New York I would never have been able to set up my shop with 6,000 euros,” says Leyla Piedayesh of Lala Berlin. As a newcomer, the woman who was born in Teheran and grew up in Wiesbaden is typical for this city, which has exchanged roughly half its population since the fall of the Wall in 1989.
The atmosphere in Berlin lures important figures: Hedi Slimane, took as creative designer at Dior Homme, the Berlin look to the Paris catwalk. Vivienne Westwood taught at the University of the Arts from 1993 to 2005 and Issey Miyake and Giorgio Armani presented major exhibitions of their work here.
Germany’s second largest consumer sector
With a turnover of 19.2 billion euros, the German textiles and clothing industry is Germany’s second largest consumer sector – after the food industry. It is based on small and medium-sized privately owned businesses, but these are often owned by international private equity firms. These are companies like Adidas, Esprit, Escada, Hugo Boss and Puma to name just some of the more famous. According to the German Fashion Association, Germany is the world’s second largest fashion exporting country – after Italy. However, the businesses involved are seldom recognized as German companies. Whether Cinque, René Lezard, Oui or Strenesse, most of their names are borrowed from French or Italian.
The designers also have the necessary competence, but many of them became successful abroad where they moved immediately after completing their studies. Grit Seymour is a prominent example. After studying in Berlin and London, she worked as a designer for Donna Karan (New York) and Max Mara (Reggio Emilia) before going to Daniel Hechter (Paris) and Hugo Boss Woman (Milan) as chief designer. Today she is passing on her experience as a professor in Berlin. Many of her colleagues – such as Lutz Hülle, Bernhard Willhelm, Markus Lupfer, Stephan Schneider or Daphne and Vera Correll – have set up their own businesses in Paris, London, Antwerp or New York.
Then there are the designers who set up their own labels in Germany. In Berlin alone there are some 600 to 800 fashion labels (such as Bless, c.neeon, Firma, Frank Leder, Michael Michalsky, Kostas Murkudis, Michael Sontag, Trippen). In addition to these there are countless more in Hamburg (FKK, Anna Fuchs, Garment, Herr von Eden, Sium, Bettina Schoenbach – she dressed chancellor Angela Merkel –, Tonja Zeller), Cologne (Eva Gronbach), Munich (Ivonne Fehn, Haltbar, Marcel Ostertag, Hannes Roether, Talbot & Runhof) and even Gütersloh (Annette Görtz) or Weißenburg (Regent) to mention just a few cities and names.
The Strength of Silence
The fashions of these German designers have many facets. They combine ambitious design, independence and saleability at a high standard. They can be fresh and humorous (Joel Horwitz), ironic (Stephan Schneider), elegant (Michael Sontag), puritan (Jil Sander), poetic (Wunderkind), colourful (c.neeon), intelligent and innovative (Trikoton) or witty and playful (Bernhard Willhelm). Berlin fashions in particular are fundamentally younger, fresher and wilder than the international luxury brands. They tend to be more original than commercially oriented and often have rough edges. The “high fashion segment” like Bless and c.neeon often has great proximity to art.
Gritty glamour
Yet the collections always stem “from the street”, often influenced by Berlin itself. “Gritty glamour” is how the well-known fashion journalist Suzy Menkes described it. And yet German fashion still differs from the fashion of levity and lightness of the Romance countries. Instead of focusing on image, attention is directed at the product itself. There is no desire to produce trivialities without character, instead the goal is relevance and equilibrium that relies on interiority rather than passion. It is a sobriety that never wants to be “L’art pour l’art”. Stephan Schneider talks about a very modest, restrained fashion.
German designers’ fashion always contains an element of the underground, of independence, commitment and idealism. Never theless, despite all their expertise, they have to live largely without public attention. The bridge from catwalk to shop is missing. There are few points of contact between fashion designers and the clothing industry. After the outstanding training at one of the over forty fashion schools in Germany the graduates who want to do more than just interpret trends find it easier to gain experience at the best fashion houses in Paris, Milan, London and Antwerp than with German clothing manufacturers.
Just as Germany has frequently provided new impulses in many fields of art and culture, the time would now appear right for doing the same in the world of fashion. It is therefore important to take the – apparently – frivolous seriously. And to unite the previously strictly separated perspectives of fashion as commercial and cultural goods in order to strengthen both – for the benefit of creative designers and business people and, not least, their customers.
Published/Released
Deutschland Magazin, 1/2010, “The Power of Restraint“, page 26 – 30
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