Berlin Fashion Week 2012 – AUGUSTIN TEBOUL first made a splash with their mystique and creativity last summer during the Berlin Fashion Week 2011, winning the SYFB award. This year, the two female designers are back on Berlin’s catwalk (July 4 – 7, 2012) with their signature aesthetic that arises from the conception of two contrasting personalities: German-born Annelie Augustin with subtle, minimal shapes and her sophisticated mind and French-born Odély Teboul, the rather chaotic, nostalgic crafts-woman.
Tracing the Locations of Berliner Chic – Berliner Chic is a phrase associated with more than just the local fashion industry and its ready-to-wear clothing. Berliner Chic is a cultural concept that evokes history: the turbulent story of the efforts and strives of creative designers and manufacturers in Berlin, whose attempts to establish Berlin as a fashion capital have been continuously interrupted by politics, ideology, and war. It evokes the notion of quality (the tradition of handmade clothes) and a certain urban flare that persists to this day in the contemporary fashion scene.
Berliner Chic – One Year Later – Berlin is the city for new and non-traditional media. It is becoming increasingly apparent that just as for city-guide publishers, it may be a futile project to put anything about Berlin in print. The city changes daily, renaming its streets and metro stops, replacing old buildings and establishments with new ones, and generally moving the sand from one “beach-bar event” to another.
Berlin Fashion Week 2011 – The 9th Fashion Week in Berlin (July 5-10, 2011) revealed the new Spring/Summer 2012 collections at a new location on Strasse des 17. Juni, with the main entrance across from the Brandenburg Gate (also known as the Fan-Mile during the World Cup public viewings). The key players of the Berlin fashion scene who were invited to present in the main tent this year included: Michael Michalsky, Michael Sontag, Vladimir Karaleev, Katja Will (C’est Tout), Iris van Herpens, Lala Berlin, Marcel Ostertag, Kaviar Gauche, and others.
c.neeon – are Berlin-based designers Doreen Schulz and Clara Leskovar. Doreen comes from Thüringen (in the former East) and Clara is from West-Berlin. They met at fashion school, Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee, where Clara studied textile design and Doreen fashion design. They began to collaborate in their third year, and found their label in 2004. Already in 2005 they received their first fashion award at the Hyères Festival International de Mode et Photographie in southern France. In 2006, the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum organized an exhibition of their collection.
Kaviar Gauche Berlin – Designers Johanna Kühl and Alexandra Fischer-Roehler studied together at Berlin’s ESMOD fashion school and established their label Kaviar Gauche Berlin in 2004. They opened their flagship store in Berlin, at Linienstr. 44, in May 2010.
Natascha Loch – Berlin fashion designer at work – Natascha Loch is a Berlin fashion designer who specializes in knit-design. Born and raised in Eckenhaid, near Nürnberg, she moved to Berlin in 2001 to study fashion design. She established her own label in 2006. Since then, she has created more than six collections and has been participating at major fashion shows. Her designs can be purchased at several stores in Berlin and Vienna.
Hypnosis Berlin – are the Berlin-based designers Niklas Kauffeld and Matthias Jahn. Originally from Kassel, they reunited in Berlin in the early 1990s and found their label in 2006, and have been presenting their collections at international fashion shows since 2008. I visited them in their atelier and show room in Friedrichshain.
Visions & Fashion – Exhibition at the Kulturforum – Just in time for the Berlin Fashion Week starting next week, the Lipperheide Costume Library at the Kultuforum at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin opened its new exhibition, entitled “Visions & Fashion: Images of Fashion 1980-2010” on display from June 30 until October 9, 2011.
Berlin-Avantgarde – Art, Fashion & Interior Design – Located in Nollendorferstr. 11/12 in Schöneberg, this is an art gallery, lounge, fashion and design store, as well as a platform for contemporary artists and exhibition space for charity auctions and art shows. Established in September 2010, it was conceptualized to be avant-garde, creative, and open-minded, and to present contemporary ways of combining arts with pleasure (as the website states).
S.Wert Design – Urban Stories – This brand began with a research project of Fernsehturm graphics in 2001, which turned into the book publication Von der Partei zur Party 1969-2003 – Der Berliner Fernsehturm als grafisches Symbol (2003), by Dirk Berger, Ingo Müller, and Sandra Siewert. who came to Berlin in 1992 from Basel, and has been translating Berlin’s surfaces and façades into her graphic designs.
F.C. Gundlach and the Modern Woman on the Street – As Perry Anderson pointed out, “German culture in the past third of a century has been distinguished less as a matrix of ideas than of images” (Anderson, “A NEW GERMANY?” April 2009). With the explosion of visual culture and new media over the past century, his claim is almost self-evident, yet the question becomes then, how is this matrix of images constructed, and what kinds of narratives do those images create? Capturing images of fashion and film for popular magazines of post-war Germany, F.C. Gundlach’s photographs have no doubt become part of this visual matrix.
Berlin Fashion Treasures in Vancouver – Berlin is chic. And as it turns out, traces of its style, culture, and history can be found all over the globe. Having established various “locationalities” of Berlin fashion in cultural establishments such as film, photography, music, museums, and fashion shows, I could not help but notice how far Berliner Chic stretches.