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271 Chapter 15 Euro Chic: Fashion’s Bread & Butter Susan Ingram “Sociality is the capacity of being several things at once.” –G.H. Mead The slogan for the Bread & Butter trade fair in the summer of 2009 was “Bread & Butter is coming home!”—meaning that it was leaving Barcelona, where it had been based for four seasons, and moving back to Berlin, where it had taken place from 2003 to 2005, after which it held back-to-back events in both Barcelona and Berlin. Starting out in 2001 in Cologne with a concept for “an innovative trade fair event for the progressive, contemporary clothing culture,” Bread & Butter originally ran bi-annually as a parallel event to Cologne’s Herrenmodewoche (Men’s Fashion Week) / InterJeans, and its immediate success encouraged organizers to become more ambitious and more involved in the branding battles that cities now wage mercilessly for coveted “world” or “global” city status.1 Building on previous work done on Berlin’s success in mobilizing fashion to brand itself (Ingram and Sark), what I am looking at in this contribution are fashion-oriented identities that get coded “European” and the role that fashion trade shows have played in this process. Because trade shows cater to and are exclusively for industry representatives, they allow us to look further behind the scenes than we can, for example, with fashion shows. Bread & Butter’s feeling “at home” in Berlin directs us to a key characteristic of the kind of European identity that fashion trade shows live off of parasitically and which they also help to create: namely, a kind of sophisticated slumming. After first showing how this kind of Jekyll/Hyde (“we’re so very respectable, we’re so very not respectable”) mechanism works in the case of Bread & Butter, I then Chapter 15 272 turn to the Premium trade show that also premiered in Berlin in 2003 and demonstrate that even in what initially appears to be a more straightforwardly elite-oriented show, one can also discover the seductively ambivalent high-low nature of Euro Chic that makes it seem like the best of both, and therefore all possible, worlds. That fashion trade shows—like the fashion shows and fashion industry they cater to—are based on the principle of exclusivity is evident not only in their registration and ID procedures but also in the name of Bread & Butter’s main sponsor partner: vente-privee. Headquartered in Paris since starting up in 2001, vente-privee has grown into one of the leaders of the European e-commerce industry. As one can see from its advertising in the Bread & Butter Tradeshow Guide, which prominently occupies the last two pages of the guide and therefore invites being literally ripped off, it is proud to be number one in Europe, and even spells out “number one” in a way that looks European, using French in an otherwise English-language context. Additionally, in its online press kit, vente-privee boasts of having “more than 10 million subscribed members in Europe” and “over 38 million products sold through 2,500 sales in Europe” (my emphasis), underscoring the field it identifies with and sees itself operating in. Many of the more than 1,200 designer brands vente-privee sells in limited two- to four-day runs are also present at Bread & Butter; to take a random example, the four brands that happened to have sales on vente privee on the day I was working on this part of this project (July 19, 2010)—Diesel, DKNY Jeans, Moschino, and Lonsdale of London—were also all in the last Bread & Butter Brand bible. The exclusivity of the fashion trade can therefore be seen to be tempered by inclusivity in terms of style. Bread & Butter may identify itself in its promotional materials as “an international specialist trade fair for Street and Urban Wear,” but it also claims that it “represents a marketing and communication platform for brands, labels and designers from the areas of Denim, Sportswear, Street Fashion, Function Wear and Casual Dressed Up”—even its “dressed up” category is casual. This tendency is also evident in both Bread & Butter’s and Premium’s choice of location. Bread & Butter started off in a derelict, crumbling factory in Spandau on the outskirts of the city before moving to an old hangar at Tempelhof airport, while Premium premiered in a conversation-worthy section of an underground U-Bahn tunnel beneath Potsdamer Platz that was no longer being used, before moving to the centrally...

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