Why I no longer believe in Berlin as an up-and-coming fashion city since I've been living in New York City
By Jelena Dauter
Whoever thought that Berlin would eventually become the driving force in sustainable fashion was probably very wrong. Berlin is a great place to live, to grow up and to get old, but it is not designed to run a fashion label and especially not one that is particularly sustainable. If you want to buy fabrics for prototypes and production, you'll find them (if at all) at a Turkish dealer on the market, made of a questionable quality and indefinable materials or at the shop that sells mainly fabrics for children's fashion and housewives. As a fashion student in Berlin, you're forced to get your sources from other designers or from far away, or you build your image on upcycling and work with second-hand goods - probably what Berlin does best by far. But New York is different. There is not only a district called the garment district, but that is exactly what it is. A hustle and bustle of vendors with stacks of cardboard boxes of clothes, interns moving garment bags from A to B and old-established fabric and trim merchants - you find them all. It's almost as if time has stood still, as if New York is frozen in the 60s, with its business sense and working spirit. If you have a fashion label here, you will find everything you need right on your doorstep, from fabrics to productions to creatives and the end consumer. No production abroad, no tedious events with people you might not even like, no materials from dubious sellers. It's all local. Even if New York is falling behind more and more in the popularity of Fashion Week and Paris is actually now in the lead all by itself, New York has one thing that the other cities don't have: Perseverance. If only Americans were more interested in sustainability, the city could become a real trailblazer.
The city is full of small fashion labels and most of them are neighbours, they all live on the same street, they are all on the same side. Isn't that our future? Local, that's the language NYC speaks, which you wouldn't expect from such an international city. It's full of culture and life, and above all, it's full of the drive to succeed. The best product, the best employee of the month, the highest salary, the best contacts. For a city full of people who love nothing more than living a clean lifestyle and taking on new challenges, sustainable fashion would probably be the best project they could take on while the Parisians sit in their luxury fashion houses, the Milanese rave about tradition and the Londoners are about to create a new subculture.
Now, Berlin hasn't been called the up-and-coming fashion city for a while, especially not since Copenhagen took over, but the hope still remains, especially for the Berliners. But the city doesn't have the right infrastructure for it, it's full of creative people, all thirsty for jobs, not knowing where to go with themselves, in a country that knows all about economizing and how to spend the least amount of money on everything.