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| Case study: The Japanesey baby-doll on the far right. There were about twenty of those roaming the garden. |
One of the overwhelming senses one gets from this city is the tremendous feeling of freedom that seems to breeze through the people who live and work here. I don’t mean freedom of opinion or the freedom to marry any of a number of different genders or any of the other United-Nationsy freedoms which bore us on a daily basis with their endless bloody controversy; I simply mean a sense of pure personal freedom, the freedom to be exactly how we want to be if that is, in fact, how we want to be. People seem, in a way more pronounced than anywhere else I have ever been, to be dressing and expressing themselves and carrying themselves in just the way that they choose. This isn’t to say that Berlin is a utopic society where the Individual has finally found the personal power and spiritual liberation to realise his true expression without being pigeonholed – on the contrary, the sheer variety of different styles you see on the street have just led to a vigorous and hilarious number of ways to judge people and laugh about them – but the difference is that no-one, who might conceivably be being judged, gives a monkey’s.
This means a lot to me when it comes to personal style, because my own style is a carefully honed mixture of clashing bright colours, slightly badly-fitting charity shop finds and as many different patterns as possible. In my own self-indulgent hipster mentality I try to look as non-standard as I can. In the UK this is a risky direction to take because if you are not willing to embrace leggings as your lord and saviour you have already taken the first of the few steps leading to the Dark Place of fashion ostracism. Here, however, everyone is doing their own thing and while it may not often look great I do have a great respect for the people whose external fashioning of themselves is just whatever the hell they like or feel comfortable in: the dudes who wear heavy-duty work trousers all the time even outside of work just because they’re good and practical, the completely straight not-at-all-gay-or-even-leaning-that-way men who wear skin-tight chest-hair-sprouting tank tops and loafers, the women who wear those lovely clothes imported from Nepal which look more like Queen Guinevere costumes…
This freedom of fashion also means that you get some people who just look goddam great because over here you are allowed to do whatever the heck pleases you regardless of whether it just might be ludicrous. I recently saw three young, not at all related and very good-looking men wandering along the street all wearing identical t-shirts, cargo shorts and espadrilles but just in alternating colours – green espadrilles on one, a green t-short for the other – they looked brilliant purely because it was so subtly weird that it took me a good few minutes to figure out What Was Wrong With This Picture. It also means that you can be a lot more slummy in public as you can in the UK without feeling bad about it. You can wear really, really, really dirty or ragged or pajama-y clothes without worrying that people are assuming that you are a terrible and perverted human being. This has the added joy that people accidentally allow their little insanities to shine through without noticing. One woman on the S-Bahn the other day was wearing a very old and clearly much-worn pair of sunglasses which still had the “UVB 400 LO-GLARE” stickers stuck directly on the centre of each lens. Another guy, a beggar who came onto the train and delivered a wonderfully charming speech about how much he would appreciate someone buying his magazine or simply donating some food and even if not he hoped you would have a lovely day, turned around after his sweet and friendly presentation to display a rucksack with a massive swastika on the back.
There are, of course, certain groups and sub-genres of fashion that pop up in this place, and I won’t mention the hipsters any more in this post since the poor things have such a hard time; it must be pretty tortuous yearning to be defined by your individuality among a social set where everyone is so purposefully individual that they are all homogenously the same. No, my favourite has got to be the one style which you won’t find anywhere else in the world outside of German-speaking nations, and I refer to the style characterised by that legendary brand Jack Wolfskin. It is the ultra-German fashion of the ‘urban-casual hiker’, a brilliant and popular style of dress where you wear highly outdoorsy and hard-wearing clothes simply to trot around the U-Bahn and get a latte with your Kumpels. Jack Wolfskin, Animal, Ripcurl etc.- any outdoorsy brand will do as long as your ensemble is suitable for both city living and a spontaneous romp deep into the forests, possibly with makeshift-rafting included. These urban hikers wear walking boots all the time regardless of time of year and the real hardcores even go for waterproof trousers and windproof jackets. Of course, because the Germans have better skin than us Brits with our complexions of an untoasted pita, they tan and thus look pretty damned good in all this stuff, even – dare I say it – when they sign off their outfit at the bottom with a pair of socks-with-sandalled feet.
Me, well, I think I’ll stick with my twee little scrapbook outfits until I find something I can wear which neither makes me look fourteen or forty but somewhere comfortably in between, but it’s nice to feel that whatever I do choose to throw on I won’t be being laughed at. And if I am being laughed at, it’s probably just because I remind people a little of Mr Bean.
