Berlin Fashion after 30 Years of Unity As sustainability takes centre stage, Berlin walks the catwalk on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

This Fall Winter 20/21 Mercedes-Benz FashionWeek season marked the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or rather it was the first Fashion Week since this remarkable anniversary was celebrated last November.

The Berlin Wall has now been down longer than it was up, a fact which serves to highlight how far removed this city has become from its divided past. The fashion scene has moved on too but again politics has found its way back onto the catwalk. An industry so fast-moving, whose trends die almost as soon as they’ve been generated, where models get dumped after a couple of seasons, and ideas are judged against yardsticks which get changed so often that even Karl Largerfeld’s legacy is now under threat because of a comment which has since become “out-of-season”, is an industry which one might expect to recover from political turmoil very quickly. And in many ways, it does, but Berlin’s scars are still quite raw.
These scars run deep and they run right through the matrix of MBFW locations. One of which was my first show of the week: William Fan. The venue: TV Tower. From here the guests could see the cityscape in all its midwinter glory. What would have been the thoughts of an East German tourist as he looked out of the big ball in the sky? You can see everything there; East, West, North, and South: the pre-reunification equivalent of Google Maps. Fan paid homage to the Berlin he knows and loves through this collection.

These days the rough Berlin charm is becoming a marketable asset and the fashion event organizers did a good job of utilizing the rough spaces around the city this season. Perhaps the best example of this was the Marina Hoermanseder show, which took place at Neuzeit Ost, an old warehouse in the East. From the kitsch décor of the TV Tower to the jagged concrete pillars of the Kraftwerk, we saw Berlin with a very firm aesthetic, shaped by the dramatic socio-political changes in the modern era. The focus on sustainability this year does make one wonder if more socio-political drama is on the horizon.