Michalsky RTW Spring 2010

With a reputation for showmanship, Michael Michalsky was right at home in Berlin’s iconic Friedrichstadtpalast theater, the stage set with a cardboard-cutout backdrop of a crazed, apocalyptic Berlin-meets-New York cityscape complete with a crashed Lear jet. Ostensibly, the show’s theme was money and the economic crisis. “It sounds a lot like 1929 revisited,” Michalsky wrote in the program notes, which pointed to Dorothea Lange’s Depression era photographs as the main source of inspiration for the show’s work wear-inpsired looks. Men fared better in their utility clothes: bleached carpenter jeans, jeans jackets with ticking stripes and smart city suits dressed down with hoodies. The apron dresses, however, seen through an Eighties prism, were often frumpy and the women’s collection lacked cohesion.