You never forget such a fashion show.

January 17, 2018, large dining room in the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin.

In the first row the actresses Katharina Schüttler, Julia Malik, Anna Maria Mühe, Nadine Warmuth.

On the catwalk - i.e. the parquet - models in simple and stylish fashion, withdrawn and still desirable, oversized coats, flowing silk tops, wide trousers, great colors.

When they had made their rounds, the models sat together in changing line-ups at a long table like young women for a last supper.

Alfons Kaiser

Responsible editor for the section “Germany and the World” and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin.

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The tableau vivant was symbolic, not only because the room in Leonardo da Vinci's painting also has three windows in the background.

But it wasn't until three months later that all layers of this story peeled off.

Johanna Perret and Tutia Schaad announced that they would be discontinuing their Perret Schaad fashion brand after nine years.

Two protagonists of the Berlin Fashion Week stopped without a hitch.

They had dressed up wonderfully at the end of the day.

The power of fashion: At that moment you felt the importance - although only the two fashion designers suspected that the last meal was also the last time.

Great designers became very small

From a Christian point of view, death is followed by resurrection. German fashion can only pray that it will come this way. Because the “Berlin fashion miracle”, which we wrote about in the FAZ in the best of faith, only lasted a decade: from the beginning of the fashion week in 2007 with all the trade fairs and shows to this day in January 2018. It was the best decade in terms of style of German fashion since the twenties. But the great miracle was paid out in small coins. While small designers grew up in the four big fashion cities of the world, big designers became very small in Berlin: Achtland, Macqua, Sisi Wasabi, von Wedel & Tiedeken, Firma, Pulver, Issever Bahri, Augustin Teboul - they all went ahead of their time Away everything earthly.

It was like real art, not just applied art: you watched as all these young designers consumed themselves. Aesthetically this is a gain, economically it is usually of no use. Wolfgang Joop, who “caught exactly the right moment in the eighties when there was still no fast fashion” and saved himself the Berlin fashion week last week, diagnosed the problem from his vacation in Ibiza: “German entrepreneurs don't trust creative people - when they're not designing a car, and even then they're still talking. "

In France it is very different.

The luxury entrepreneur Bernard Arnault has become one of the richest people in the world because he involved and marketed creative people.

It was an extreme venture and really took courage: Marc Jacobs, who brought Louis Vuitton back up, was addicted to heroin in the nineties, and John Galliano, who animated Dior, droned on that he loved Hitler;

that went too far and he had to go.

In any case, no medium-sized fashion entrepreneur in Germany would dare to go to the limits of creativity with designers.

The big companies are in the German provinces, the big designers in their Berlin studio, and they just don't want to come together.