Berlin Fashion Week is taken more seriously again since the Senate through its strategic funding is helping to move things in the right direction. Trips to New York and Seoul for young designers, coordinated schedules, historic locations not tents and so on. Even Anna Wintour stopped by last week. But the biggest designers living in Berlin are Swiss and they show in Paris: Ottolinger. It kind of looks like a club, Y2K, sexy, dystopian, like Berghain, post-apocalyptic cyberpunk or the contemporary gallery scene. But what is usually overlooked is that behind Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient’s designs there is an enormous textile expertise and a knowledge of all things fashionable, perhaps even social debates on what is sexy or not. Hence, Puma is collaborating with them, Swisscom came calling with a project called 079 and even Jean Paul Gaultier sought them out in the post Jean Paul days. For this show they added a layer of street cred by collaborating with Shayne Oliver who has ruled above mentioned Berlin Fashion Week with his line Anonymous Club, called Ottonymous. The show opened with neoprene tights with heels on bra tops which spelled out the collab name. Ottolinger’s dresses often have cutouts and slits in the wrong and therefore exactly right places while the silhouette was lean and long with most dresses touching the floor. This show had a classic fashion spin with major blown out hair and some attempts at volume play with exaggerated and inflated pieces around torso in pink. Interestingly the show notes referred to the Ottolinger woman being a shark drifting between cities, an apt description for their collections which defy categorization.