The development is all the more remarkable, given Germany's long- held reputation as a fashion wasteland. "Fashion from Germany. Apparently it's back on the catwalk," notes Bettina Musall, a German fashion writer.
That wasn't the case a few years ago, when many of the more talented German fashion designers moved to Paris, Milan or London in search of recognition. Two design school students who did just that were Bernard Willhelm and Markus Lupfer.
They soon won reputations abroad for their creative style and cartoonish flair, whereas back at home they often struggled for recognition. "Very often whatever comes from Germany is at first kind of rejected," complained Lupfer recently. "Someone else has to say it's good first. Somehow, Germans are not confident about their fashion sense."
That may now be changing. In dozens of courtyards in central Berlin, people are busy sketching, patterning and sewing, inventing new labels, renting shared studios and coming up with unconventional presentation and marketing concepts.
Wilhelm, though based in Paris, sells mostly in Japan, Italy and England. But even he is now represented today in Berlin by a boutique called "Apartment" selling his line. "I think something is starting to happen in Berlin," he says.
Der Morgenpost, a Berlin daily newspaper recently reported that the German capital was now one of the world's top fashion centres. While this is over-the-top hype, Berlin's fashion scene has improved after years of stagnancy, thanks to a shoal of innovative new designers, most of them operating on minimal budgets.
The city's atmosphere of creative freedom helps. Already, renowned fashion trade fairs have hooked into Berlin's growing trade fair calender.
Off-beat designers relish Berlin's bizarre range of fashion haunts, found in subway vaults, abandoned factories and tunnels that have, virtually overnight, been mutated into trendy showrooms.
More than 65,000 fashion experts from around the world turned up in Berlin in January for a spate of shows - "Bread and Butter," "Premium," and "Spirit of Fashion", "B-in-Berlin," "Luxury Tradeshow Pariser Platz," "Eurofashion Week" and "Fame" among them.
Some 650 exhibitors and 40,000 spectators were involved in the trendy "Bread and Butter" show, staged in an old cable factory in Spandau, a district in north west Berlin where Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess, was kept locked up for 40 years in a fortress jail - until his suicide in the mid-1980s. <!--page-->
Anita Bachelin, 32, Premium's founder, who studied textile technology in Moenchengladbach in western Germany, tells of New York stylists getting a "culture shock" in Berlin, when confronted by city walls still pock-marked from the war, and gala events held in dilapidated buildings at which po-faced waiters offer oysters and meat balls.
"Sauerkraut and crepes", chuckles Wolfgang Joop, who has a mansion in Potsdam, near Berlin. Long internationally established, he is never away from Berlin for long. For him the German capital is a raucous blend of trash and tinsel, sensuality and sauciness. A place which daily holds out the promise of "new beginnings".
Among Germany's new generation of designers are people like Martin Brem, Mari Otberg, and Frank Leder.
Upbeat about the fashion industry, Brem feels anyone supplying a niche market with a good design can make a good living these days. His designs made wearers feel "cool" even when they are enmeshed in a smooth, soft lining.
Otberg works to other extremes. On one of her skirt creations, forks and spoons bounce about, while on one of her dress designs a panty hose-clad leg is pictured on a man's thigh.
Back in the early part of the 20th century it was German-Jewish entrepreneurs operating in "Mitte," the city's central district, who gave the German garment industry a global reputation - before the Nazi arrival. After the war, with Berlin in ruins and carved up into four allied zones, there was no ambience in the city in which fashion designers could survive.
Germany became a fashion backwater. Few German designers, except for Jill Sander, Joop and Karl Lagerfeld in the Parisian world of haute couture at Chanel - emerged to excite the international fashion industry.
But now, with a new generation of designers in Berlin thirsting for success on the catwalks, there are signs at last of a fashion "renaissance" in the German capital.
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