If you’re a fan of following us on Twitter or Facebook, then you might have seen me typing the odd thing here and there about Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion Week. If you had read about us providing the garment care for the Grazia party in Berlin, you might have seen we had something to do with Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion Week. To be honest if you had stepped within a hundred metres of me at any point before, during or after the event you would’ve heard me banging on about Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion, it was kind of a big deal.
So to clarify, at this event, we were the proud providers of garment care. So imagine you have make up and hair, sponsored by Maybelline and L’Oréal, you also had the garment care, done by us! Now let me give you a few facts about the event that puts this in perspective, some people might call these fun facts!
The temporary site is about 3000 square metres big inside (about 12 tennis courts) and about 6000 square metres including the outside bit. This takes 600 manly man hours to build the temporary structure, 400 manly man hours to sort out the air conditioning; 1200 manly man hours for technology, 2000 manly man hours for interior design and 5000 manly man hours staff for backstage, accreditation, catering and other things. That’s a lot.
The catwalk is 28 metres long and 2.8 metres wide. The seating area for the main catwalk is for over 700 and the whole venue can hold more than 14,000 guests. There is also a studio where installations are put on. For the garment care, there are three backstage areas which have a new designer arriving every twenty minutes and in general they need everything they have made steamed. Our call time was a sexy 6 am and we knocked off at a healthy 10 pm. Let’s just say that we weren’t shy of the free coffee offered backstage!
Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion Week was erected just in front of this massive thing called Siegessäule. If you happen to be a big U2 fan, you might remember Bono swinging about on it in a video for Stay (Far Away, So Close). If you don’t remember that video, here’s a screenshot!
What a nice picture, now back to the fashooooooon.
Now if you can imagine, every designer’s clobber needs a good sorting out before being shown. Multiply that by three different backstage areas and over 100 designers.
We had our work cut out. This is what we did.
Here’s a great example of what we did. This is what we were given…
And when the work was done, this is what you get!
We were lucky enough to be given press passes, so here are some photos of some of the amazing collections we prepared!
On the opening day, Marc Jacobs hosted a competition called ‘Designer For Tomorrow’, check out their site here. This involved five amazing upcoming international designers being judged by the all cool Marc Jacobs. The winner turned out to be Leandro Cano. Other than winning the competition and getting lots of cred for that, he also gets into a sponsorship programme by Peek & Cloppenburg. Result. Here are some of our photos from it:
Mega congrats to Leandro!
Another interesting show was Guido Maria Kretschmer for Puma. It was amazing, check these out!!!
Even the uber cool mayor of Berlin was there. He’s the guy in the blue trousers. Well fashion.
I also mentioned that we took care of the garment care for the ‘Studio’ where installations were put on. We’d sort out their garms and then they’d do something interesting in the studio space. It was really cool as it took the clothes off a standard catwalk, put it in a interactive space and in some cases almost combined it with theatre. That makes it a bit Bowie, and that makes it cool.
We also tried to do a bit of street styling whilst we were there! Unfortunately we lost a lot of photos, but we kept this gem! What a dude.
I also bumped into Lily Cole! She insisted she have her photo taken with me, that’s life. Please pardon my awkward smile.
All in all, it was a fab week. Berlin is such a forward thinking city and it just made sense that we were part of their fashion week, thank you so much for inviting us guys and thanks for the super sweet letter you sent us! Here is their program with us in it too!
It was an incredible experience for us, and it seemed the designers really appreciated the machines we brought. Berlin is a bit of a magical place and I’m so glad it was the first (of hopefully many) international fashion weeks we provide the garment care for!
Thanks to IMG and everyone at Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion Week from Fridja and TEAM STEAM!
