Dhe cult of the right logo has long been a timeless trend in fashion. Only which logos are the right ones is updated regularly, depending on which fashion brands are currently considered trendy. In Berlin, at the moment, people don’t write the name of a luxury designer, but rather of a museum as brand lettering on their chest: In September, the streetwear platform Highsnobiety launched T-shirts and hoodies in cooperation with the recently reopened Neue Nationalgalerie.
The collection was created as part of the interdisciplinary “Berlin, Berlin” festival and is interesting on many levels. On the one hand, the Neue Nationalgalerie logos on the body of Berlin’s Cool Kids show that art has long been part of their self-image – or at least one likes to surround oneself with its aura. Art is in! On the other hand, fashion is also popping up more and more frequently in the art context. In general, the clothes represent the growing coexistence of fashion and art, as happened in the capital around the Berlin Art Week and the Gallery Weekend this week.
The fact that the two disciplines are mutually beneficial could already be seen at a large number of immersive events during Berlin Fashion Week a week beforehand. Where does fashion end, where does art begin? The boundaries are sometimes fluid because of the mutual creative, artistic, performative expression. In the capital, you don’t like to subordinate yourself to strict styles anyway. With gallerists like Johann König, who even sells art in department stores and regularly brings new fashion and design pieces onto the market with König Souvenir in cooperation with artists, the phenomenon is no longer a new one anyway.
“Nervous elephants”: guests of Henrik Vibskov’s exhibition in the space of the BAM agency in Berlin
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Image: Denis Kuhnert
For Mira von der Osten it is clear: “Fashion should be viewed like art”. She is the designer of the Cruba label and co-initiator of Fashion Positions, a kind of fashion exhibition within the Positions art fair, which took place again shortly before Berlin Art Week in the halls of Tempelhof Airport. Local designers, including Brachmann, Esther Perbandt, Starstyling and the new talent Laura Gerte, who won the young talent award there last year, continued to explore the boundaries between the disciplines with their artistic work. And show once again that fashion can be more than what is worn on the body through urban space.
At the same time one hopes – perhaps in both disciplines – for new target groups, ergo new customers. “Exit through the gift shop”? While the Positions is a trade fair anyway, primarily intended to sell off art, the designers have separated their artistic positions from pure sales: the exhibition was followed by a pop-up shop in which some of the participating designers found theirs Collections sold.
Inspired by architecture
Back to the exhibition: An installation by the architecture-inspired label Brachmann, which works with the Berlin Mies van der Rohe Haus, shows how the character of a house can be transferred to a piece of clothing. The result is a fashion collection that refers to van der Rohe’s clear architecture in terms of cuts, shapes and colors. Together with the photographer Axl Jansen, films based on the aesthetics of New Objectivity were created, which ran parallel on screens at Fashion Positions.
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