Germany’s Achtung Magazine Joins Fashion Film Trend

Berlin indie fashion magazine Achtung is climbing aboard the bandwagon for adding a fashion film, or two, to accompany one’s latest releases.

This weekend, the magazine — one of Germany’s longest-running alternative publications — is holding a special cocktail party and dinner at central Berlin boutique hotel Château Royal. Two short films to accompany the magazine’s 50th issue will be screened continuously in one of the hotel rooms, after which they will be available on social media.

“We wanted to bring the magazine to explore the next frontiers in media — that’s clearly the moving image,” Achtung founder Markus Ebner told WWD.

Ebner said he was inspired by recent work with moving images in the fashion world — for instance, “The Tiger” film for Gucci, under creative director Demna — and wanted to go beyond just “models dancing, laughing or posing.”

One of the Achtung short films, the 10-minute-long “Come as You Are,” follows three hip young Germans getting ready for a party in Paris and grappling with that all-too-common dilemma, trying to decide what would be the right thing to wear.

Achtung’s other shorter film sees various characters — guests in a pillow fight, apparently disgruntled intellectuals and a sugar mummy with her two younger lovers — posing in a “love hotel.” Stills from both films feature in the magazine, which was on German newsstands mid-November, as fashion editorials.

Ebner said there were some similarities between his role as Achtung’s editor in chief and that of a film director. “There’s the casting, there’s the writing, and you choose the director of photography and the locations. There are a lot of decisions to be made,” he explained. “And that was fun because it felt like you were learning something new, you were flexing a different muscle.”

The hard part actually came afterward, he said, with the editing. But this was mainly due to having to cut the short films for various different media. They had to stand on their own, Ebner said, but also be practical for a faster-paced medium like TikTok. “I think that was really the biggest challenge,” he noted.