Copenhagen Fashion Week

It was an inauspicious beginning to Copenhagen Fashion Week.  Apparently our press passes were on a press bus that was traveling around the city somewhere.  And this would have been annoying had we not been informed of the more annoying fact that our press passes were absolutely useless.

Clockwise from top left: Dino, Daniel, Philip and Jonathan

Apparently, getting accredited for Copenhagen fashion week (which I will call CFW from now on if it happens that I feel the need to call it by name again) means that you now have permission to contact all the shows you wish to attend yourself, and then they will check to make sure you are on the press list, and then grant you an invitation.  Which we hadn’t done.  We tried to explain that at Berlin Fashion week it was the shows themselves that had contacted us with invitations.  They pointed out that that was not how it worked at CFW and we couldn’t really find a way to disagree, so we took the injured pride route.  I think we dropped such classics as “we’re just not used to being treated like this,” alongside numerous unflattering and  mumbled comparisons to Berlin’s Fashion Week.

So, at this point we could do little but laugh (bitterly) about the fact that we were apparently going to get to see a grand total of zero fashion shows at the CFW which led to the unanimous and correct conclusion that it was time to go buy beer.

So, then, how did we end up going to see every single show on Saturday, including the “hot shit” Henrik Vibskov show and afterparty?  Well, I guess what we didn’t count on was how damn friendly and accommodating the Danish people are.  Or how much they apparently like Los Angeles and Mexico City.  Whatever it was this was how the conversations went (I decided to try calling up all of the show contacts as listed on the CFW website):

Me: Hello, is this (name of person listed as contact)?

Them: Yes.

Me: Hi, this is (my name) from Los Angeles and I was wondering if you might have any tickets left for your show tomorrow?

Them: Sure, who are you with?

Me: I am a freelance buyer for a boutique fashion store from Mexico City.  (Translation: I have a friend who is going to open a second hand clothing store in Mexico City)

Them: Oh, wow, great!

Me: Also I will be coming with four colleagues of mine from Berlin.  Can they also be put on the list?

Them: Sure, we look forward to seeing you.

And that was that.  What was perhaps the stranges/funniest/nicest moment was when after the Barbara i Gongini show (which was my favourite show by far) the woman that I had made my phone call with found me and apologized that she hadn’t recognized me when I had entered and put me and my “colleagues” in the front row where we were supposed to be.

Shots from Saturday

Other thoughts from the weekend which are temporally, not thematically, related:

1. Sterling airlines is crap.  The flight from Berlin is only about 40 minutes, but they were 40 uncomfortable hot minutes where they even charged for water.  This is the first time that I have been on an airline where I couldn’t even have a glass of water for free.  That should not be allowed.

2. Wooden floors in airports are not crap.  I only think I have seen them in Scandinavian countries, but they definitely give the airport a different feel.

3. I read in the International Herald Tribune that “The global television audience was estimated to surpass four billion viewers”, referring to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.  I call (emphatically) complete bullshit on this figure.  As of July 2007 there were 6,602,224,175 humans on the planet earth.  There is no fucking way that over 4 billion of them watched the opening ceremonies.  In fact, I have not yet talked to a SINGLE person who watched the opening ceremonies.  I read an article a couple of years ago by a guy who did some simple math to prove that the Oscar’s in no way, shape, or form could draw the viewership of 1-2 billion, or whatever was claimed.  34 million (or about 10% of the population) of the humans in the US watched the opening ceremony, and although perhaps China had a higher percentage of viewers, the US is tied for first with the UK for most television watched.  And the UK drew 5 million (about 8% of their population).  India, also known as the second most populous nation on earth, has only won a total of 17 Olympic medals in its HISTORY – so how interested can they possibly be in the opening ceremonies?!  And 1.6 billion people on the planet live without electricity for Christ’s sake!

So saying over four billion people watched the opening ceremonies is not only wrong, it is fucking RIDICULOUS.  It is like a lie that a kid tells when they have no ability to comprehend proportion – it reminds me a bit of the time I showed a photo of myself in the cockpit of my uncle’s plane to my grade two class for show and tell and then went on to say that I had accidentally pressed a button (semi-plausible exaggeration) that started the plane (implausible, but perhaps buyable by a class of grade twos) and then we took off and flew down to the Antarctic and landed on the ice (the plane had skis on it at this point) and then flew back.  I still cannot believe that Mrs. Malenfant kept a straight face.

My excuse is that I was seven years old, but this is the International Herald Tribune for Pete’s sake.  If the percentage of people watching the opening ceremonies around the world were roughly equivalent to that of the US (very unlikely, but China could possibly make up for some of the countries dragging the percentage down) we would have a grand total of 660 million viewers.  I doubt that four billion people on earth even realize the Olympics have already started.

Sorry to belabor the point.

4. This is perhaps the single greatest invention I have seen this year.  I want to shake the man’s hand that designed this.  The sad thing was that we only saw one of them at the Copenhagen airport.  I love the idea of a whole airport full of people zipping around on these things.

And that’s all from Copenhagen Fashion Week.