Interview

PHOTO BY TINA CASSATI

Let's be honest: Berlin Fashion Week isn't posing any immediate threat to London or Paris. But it does have its own potent brand of timeless decadence and style, embodied in the stellar body of leading fetish model, Eden Berlin.

Anyone catching the exhibition of photographs of Twiggy in London's National Portrait Gallery will know that Woody Allen failed at flirting with the model when he asked her, "Who is your favorite philosopher?" Eden Berlin, the city's  very anti-Twiggy (think Marylin Monroe..in her dreams) leading fetish model, would have no trouble with that question, and suitors might find it a great way to woo her. The answer is Bataille, although the French philosopher who found lust in filth and eroticism in death might struggle for traction with a beauty as flawless as Berlin. The model, who comes from a small German town and flirted with punk before brilliantly finding her look in a perfect embodiment of forties style, has been photographed by Peter Lindbergh for German Vogue's 30th anniversary issue and is also featured on Lady Gaga's blog. Berlin has given serious though to the implications of her look in feminist and sociological terms, but she also just finds that looking effortless and chill imposes its own tyranny and she is sorry that women feel ashamed to show pride in being pretty. In any event, she is never with a hair out of place, even in grungy Berlin, and the world she inhabits is definitely grateful for her efforts. Those who encounter her during Berin Fashion Week, or any other time when seeing her in her regular immaculate state, will feel as though they have stepped with her into Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo.

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LOOKS FROM IODICE

Why should the guys in Paris have all the fun? Brazilians are well known for showing lots of skin, but this season at Sao Paolo fashion week the skin that is getting the most loving attention isn't their own. Leather—in every variety but mostly super-supple, black, and laser cut into lace-like patterns—has captured a series of catwalks. Iodice, the high-end label that staged its show in the popular posh Iguatemi mall, presented leather leggings and leather details on jersey jumpsuits, supposedly inspired by the Amazon. Reinaldo Lourenco used leather for peaked-shouldered, military inspired suits. At the elegant Maria Bonita show (where the supremely covetable collection strongly evoked comparisons to Maria Cornejo), leather was layered in artful drapes. It was molded into stiff skirts at Forum Tufi Duek, seen as chaps at Colcci and printed to resemble tree bark at Osklen. Skin is definitely in!

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GLORIA COELHO

At Sao Paolo fashion week the chicest girls on and off the catwalk were adding both grace and levity to their looks by augmenting streamlined (even a touch severe) styles with flurries of feathers. Feathers decorated a few of the mod, multi-weaved, all white space-girl gear at Gloria Coelho. At the Iódice show, where the "Save the Rainforest" theme was less than well-supported by the masses of printed matter and cut plants on every seat, and the white and chocolate-colored feathers on boots and jackets. In the front row, puffs of angelic feathers floating from the capped sleeves of Maria Bonita's black-and-white T-shirts from last season were a recurring sight. However, the look's most beguiling presence came from Brazilian Vogue scribe Victoria Ceridono, who paired a peach-colored feathered mini with a faded denim boyfriend shirt, as if she were Jane just throwing on something of Tarzan's before flying to her first row seat for the Erika Ikezili show—definitely a chick worth flocking together with.

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PHOTO BY ANA FINEL HONIGMAN

Everyone who sketches portraits knows that the key to capturing expression is eyebrows. Tilt them or arch them or angle them in any direction and the person's features take on totally different meanings.  Which is why the sexy inscrutability of eyebrow-lessness is such a captivating trend at Sao Paolo's fashion week.  On the catwalk, the models at Priscilla Darolt, Maria Bonita and Forum Tufi Duek were deeply mysterious with their bare browbones. Off the catwalk, the trend continued. "I like being a little mysterious," said Brazilian model Indiamara whose gold-tinged black eye shadow by leading local Duda Molinos, the Bobby Brown of Brazil, is striking contrast to the alien-like baldness of her brownbone. But her gestures of enthusiasm over the makeline's winter collection were still impossible to misread.

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