The More Exciting Beauty of Berlin Fashion Week

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.