FASHION July 2013

OK, here we go! Fasten those safety belts and get ready to kick out the jams, brothers and sisters!
TEUTONIC ZEN! Here beginneth the 1st lesson!
The prime mover! The key element! The coded alchemy of what was and is really happening!
Blue eyes stare and the look is cool, hard and minimal, in the cafe’s bars and clubs of Berlin’s neon, steel and concrete
subculture. The music relentless, pulsing, driving, electronic! So cool that it’s hot! An irresistible, addictive alchemy
of sexuality and noise. It’s the look and indeed sound that’s been threatening to explode around the world for almost
two decades! Where are we? Where else but Germany!
A very late arrival at it’s own party, Germany seems blissfully unaware that it created the key elements of audio-visual
style culture, that have been pirated by style-gangsters around the world ever since Kraftwerk programmed their first
beat, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder shot his first Polaroid. Without Kraftwerk, much of contemporary music/looks
and practically all dance music would simply not exist, to listen to their 1977 recording of “Trans Europa Express”
is to listen to a piece of music unbelievably ahead of it’s time. Their visual style was of equal importance, along with
DAF, Die Krupps, Einsturzsnde Neubauten, Malaria and many others, who, unlike most of their contemporaries who
desperately tried to imitate the Anglo-American look and sound, they and Kraftwerk with a brilliant stroke of strategic
irony, celebrated their own national cliché’s and invented the future, creating a definitive style, look and sound, that
has been globally imitated and plagiarised ever since. The late German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was
equally innovative and was the first post war German film director to actually create a German aesthetic, by portraying
“Germans as Germans” with all the conflict, passion, melancholy and warped longing, that implied. The images
portrayed in his films are disturbingly beautiful, even today ,the actors and actresses in these films have a unique
beauty and power which is hard to define but, unmistakably German. Like Kraftwerk, Fassbinder was far more admired
and respected internationally than in Germany, indeed film makers such as David Lynch and many contemporary
Anglo-American directors refer to Fassbinder as the Hitchcock of his time.
The list of German Artists who are the elements of this powerful and potent alchemy is endless and of course stretches
back to Fritz Lang and Leni Riefenstahl. It should also be remembered that it was Germany that first seriously
embraced the Yohji Yamamoto aesthetic! And indeed Yohji went on to develop close friendships with Pina Bausch, the
most innovative and visually stylish dance theatre in the world, for whom he designed the most stunning costumes and
sets! And also with the innovative German film director Wim Wenders.
So all you retro timewarpers out there, better start studying your history and find out where the real source material is!
Forget ‘rock/punk/grunge revivals’ and start living in the ‘cool teutonic 21st century’!!!
OK that’s it, style junkies! What are you doing reading this stuff anyway? Get a girlfriend/boyfriend, get a life, invent
something, create something, design the future! Go out and get some fresh air! And remember, Facebook is the last exit
before death for terminally, prematurely middle-aged losers!
What else!!!! Well, if you want to get connected to the rest of the key future alchemy, then you better take your next
vacation in China, Japan or Korea, because that’s where anything cool, happening and alive is going to be coming from
(other than Berlin that is!).
Watch This Space! ‘Ich Bins’!
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JULY 2013 | http://fashion-faces.com