"You know what?" says the Uber driver.

"When I see the clothes at fashion week, I always ask myself: Who should wear this?"

He goes on to say: “Any feathers on their heads – nobody walks around like that.

And if I need a t-shirt, I go to Jack'n'Jones, they have normal stuff there."

The world of fashion is alien to him, and he believes that many Berliners feel the same way.

"I don't know anyone who walks around like the people on these shows."

Johanna Dürrholz

Editor in the “Germany and the World” department.

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So Berlin Fashion Week is back, and with it the old question: Can Germany fashion?

Can Berlin fashion?

What the Uber driver is right about: many people in Berlin don't care.

They live their lives, wear their shirts and express themselves without feathers and fuss.

And yet hardly any other European city breathes so much of what fashion actually means: zeitgeist, activity, heat - even when it's cold, energy, joy of experimentation, liveliness.

And what they wear on their big-city bodies naturally interests Berliners.

With Mercedes-Benz, the fashion week in Berlin has lost its major sponsor.

They only want to work with individual brands in the future, it said.

This year it's Marc Cain.

This means that the designers have to take care of the function rooms themselves.

For example, Kilian Kerner, Danny Reinke, Marcel Ostertag and Rebekka Ruétz have joined forces to show their new collections at the same location.

The week started with a bang

But that also means that the Berlin fashion designers can focus on their strengths, on the strengths of this city: a bit of club culture, a bit of underground.

Berlin is like a black box that you'd love to lock yourself in for a few days, but afterwards you don't know exactly what happened inside anyway.

Berlin is getting more expensive, like everything else, but it's still sexy.

Berlin vibrates.

The late fashion designer Thierry Mugler told this newspaper in 2020 about his adopted home: “Berlin is very inspiring.

There is this great balance between real life, the beautiful and peaceful life – and at the same time the extreme nightlife.”

The week then started with a bang: from a fake e-mail address, activists had invited to an alleged Adidas event on Monday, a new co-CEO should be appointed, it was said that the collection was also from pop star Pharrell Williams designed himself.

Then, on the catwalk, models, who appeared to be bleeding or injured, dressed in scraps of fabric called “reality wear” — allegedly made from garments that textile workers from Southeast Asia are said to have worn for months earlier.

And the new CEO?

A former employee from Cambodia.