photos: Fredrik Altinell
Of all the big cities in the world, Berlin appears to be somehow mainly one thing: an alternative. Not just another option, an alternative. An alternative to the high-pressure in New York, to the expensive prices in Paris, to the suboptimal living conditions in London. Berlin in itself offers so many alternatives. Every culture has a counter culture here. You have the choice to go along with the mainstream, or to take an alternative route. You have the big Berlinale Film Festival with very few women directors, writers and producers taking part, and than there is the Feminist Film Week. You have all the big theater stages with your typical theater fair, and than there are all these small independent ones showing highly progressive and experimental pieces. You have heaps of conventional night clubs and bars, and you have those where you can appear naked or have sex in the middle of the dance floor.
And of course you have the official Berlin Fashion Week with celebrity craze and commercial labels, with its counter part being the Berlin Alternative Fashion Week that brings young, eccentric and creative designers into the limelight. Exactly this BAFW stands as a perfect example for the parallel worlds inside Berlins fashion scene. I have personally been to both, and I can tell you the audiences they attract couldn’t be further apart from each other. If you don’t believe me, believe your eyes this coming Friday and Saturday when their runway shows dedicated to recycled and avant-garde fashion, respectively, take place.
Berlin’s tendency for alternative lifestyle of course doesn’t end with fashion. It stretches into every other creative genre from music, art, photography, writing. A great resource for counter culture is Black Book, a magazine dedicated to the avant-garde lifestyle. Their recent portrait series “Kids of Berlin”, a collaboration with Splendor Magazine photographed by Fredrik Altinell, shows one of the many subcultures of the city: the ravers. In the photos you see them in their typical night outfits and they talk about their view on party culture, love and politics. With this article we show you a little preview for you, the full series comes out soon in the next print issue of Splendor.
