Dandy Diary

» see dandydiary.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Berlin fashion week had an unofficial opening party for most of the 2010s, and the two men who threw it ran a blog. I have no claim on that world whatsoever. Those years I spent doing engineering work in Ankara, aged twenty-five when the blog started and thirty-seven when it stopped, and German menswear writing never once came up on my screen. The blog is worth a grave anyway, for what it decided a blog could be.

David Kurt Karl Roth started Dandy Diary in 2009. He was studying fashion journalism, there were almost no German-language fashion blogs written for men, and he told Welt the following year that he wanted to state plainly what works and what does not. The paper called him the enfant terrible of the fashion bloggers, which is the sort of label you get handed once and then have to keep earning.

In 2010 Carl Jakob Haupt joined as second writer and second operator. He was a political scientist by training and an old schoolfriend of Roth's, and from that point the site was less an opinion column than a two-man operation with a taste for staging things.

~ the dossier ~

~ the film ~

In January 2012 the pair put out a film called Será el comienzo, which the German press wrote up as a fashion porno and which premiered in a Neukölln sex cinema. The notices were good, and the stunt paid off exactly as intended: a men's fashion blog nobody outside the trade knew about was suddenly in Spiegel and in the Berlin dailies.

~ the elephant ~

From that same month onward, Dandy Diary threw an unofficial opening party the day before each Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung later described it as the most spectacular event of the fashion week, and it was never once on the official schedule.

The first one ran with the blog LesMads at a club called Flamingo, licensed for about four hundred people. It was sealed at eleven at night with eight hundred more outside, some of whom waited for hours. The July 2012 edition took two circus tents at the Postbahnhof and fourteen hundred guests, with fire-eaters and a live elephant. Animal-rights campaigners came to shut it down and failed.

~ february 2021 ~

Carl Jakob Haupt died in April 2019, and the FAZ ran its obituary on the twenty-fourth. Roth kept the site up for nearly two more years and then announced the end of it in February 2021, which the German fashion-trade press noted on the twenty-eighth.

dandydiary.de answers nothing today, not even a parking page. What survives of the elephant, and of the eight hundred people locked out of the Flamingo, sits in other people's archives.

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