Fashion Garments

There is — if we are to believe what we read — a “revolution” going on in fashion. A “new era” has dawned, say the people who have engineered it, in which the pale shadow of wafer-thin professional models has been banished. From now on, we’re told, it’s all about “real people”. Professional models — the underfed, unfairly beautiful and long-legged pariahs of our age — are toast.

And where is this so-called revolution taking place? On the pages of the weekly magazine Brigitte. If you’ve never heard of Brigitte, that’s probably because it’s published in Germany, a country whose inhabitants have traditionally remained indifferent to the dictates of high or even middle-of-the-road fashion. Most non-German style mavens agree that, outside Berlin and possibly Hamburg, Germany is the beating heart of appalling clothes taste and diabolical asymmetric hairstyles.

So disastrous is the country’s sartorial reputation abroad that Karl Lagerfeld has spent his entire career distancing himself from his country of birth. Officially he is “European”, never German. As for German designer labels — Hugo Boss, Joop!, Gerry Weber, Basler, to name just a handful — though commercially successful, they are regarded within the industry as drab and overly commercial.

Sue Evans, senior catwalk editor at the Worth Global Style Network told me: “I can’t think of a single inspirational German label. They’re mostly dreary, mumsy labels that are targeted at middle-aged women.” Dreary and mumsy is also how somebody such as Sue would describe the reassuringly homely pages of Brigitte. But though its average reader is 48, it is also Germany’s bestselling woman’s magazine and therefore undeniably influential

source:http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/fashion/article7008640.ece