Germany Fashion Weeks

A fashion week is a fashion industry event, lasting approximately one week, which allows fashion designers and fashion houses to display their latest collections in runway shows for buyers and the international fashion community — and Germany's fashion weeks, centred on Berlin, hold the country's place in that international circuit.

This page is the German entry in the Apparel Search fashion week directory. The full country directory is kept below, and Berlin's fashion week is recorded in the guide's second page, in the directory records kept there: Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin, presented alongside the trade fairs that make Berlin a working fashion city as well as a runway city.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not photographs from these shows.

Berlin: Runway and Trade Fair Together

The Berlin record in this directory pairs the runway with the trade floor, and that pairing is the German model's signature. Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin brought the sponsor-backed runway format to the capital, while PREMIUM Berlin — whose concept of selection, high quality and exclusivity in a modern setting has made its mark nationally and internationally since its premiere in January 2003 — anchored the order-writing side. A designer could show in Berlin and sell in Berlin in the same trip, which is precisely what a fashion capital outside the big four has to offer to compete.

Mercedes-Benz and fashion, as the Berlin record puts it, have several things in common: for both, design and style are the key to success. The sponsorship era that put car brands' names on fashion weeks from Berlin to New York and Australia is itself part of this directory's record — a period when the fashion week format was valuable enough that global brands paid to stand in its title.

Germany in the World Directory

Read in the full directory below, Germany sits among the European fashion week countries between France and the smaller capitals, and the guides linked above give the comparisons: France for the federation-run Paris system, Croatia for a single-city international week, China for scale, and Canada for the regional model. Germany's contribution to that map is the industry version of the fashion week — a capital where the runway is backed by one of Europe's strongest trade-fair traditions, in the country whose garment and textile machinery, retail and manufacturing the rest of this site documents in depth.

Reading Germany's Record in This Guide

Germany's entry in this directory is deliberately two-part. This page holds the country's place in the international list — the standing statement of what a fashion week is and where Germany's events belong among the world's. The Berlin detail lives in the guide's second page, where the directory records describe Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin and PREMIUM Berlin in the events' own terms. Splitting the record that way matches how the German industry itself is organized: Berlin as the visible capital of shows and fairs, inside a national industry whose strength has always been distributed — manufacturing, retail and trade fairs across many cities rather than concentrated in one.

For the wider German industry beyond the runway, this site's Germany clothing industry pages and the trade show directories linked from the records below carry the story further, from the country's textile machinery to its retail market.