LE BOOK sits with Scott Lipinski

Berlin Doesn't Need Paris' Permission: Inside Germany's Fashion Renaissance with Scott Lipinski

Scott Lipinski's career reads like a plot twist. He built his foundation at Accenture, learned the language of strategy and analysis, and then Wolfgang Joop opened a door most consultants never even see: fashion. Today, as CEO of Fashion Council Germany, he applies the same clear-eyed method to an entire industry that he once applied to boardrooms. "As a consultant working with companies across a wide range of industries, my role was to analyse the current situation, define where we wanted to get to, and identify the best ways of achieving those goals," he explains. It's the exact framework he's carried into the role: where are we coming from, where do we want to go, and how do we get there together?

Rewriting the "under the radar" narrative

Ask him whether Germany's low profile in fashion actually works in its favor, and he pushes back on the premise entirely. He doesn't believe German fashion has ever lacked creativity, only recognition. He points to a direct lineage running from the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s through Jil Sander's breakthrough in the '90s, up to contemporary names like GmbH and Ottolinger. Beyond the runway, he's quick to note Germany's real structural strengths: fibre and material development, technological and sustainable innovation, and major retail players spanning both online and offline.

Under his leadership, Berlin Fashion Week has drawn editors from Vogue Business, Forbes and WWD Japan, and buyers from stores like Antonioli and Printemps, people who, in his words, "keep returning to see what's happening in Berlin." His conclusion is blunt: Germany doesn't need to measure itself against Paris or Milan. "We've long established a strong profile of our own."

Quiet influence, loud modesty

That influence, he argues, often moves invisibly through the industry. Jonathan Anderson has called the Gemäldegalerie, the same Berlin museum where Fashion Council Germany recently staged an exhibition with The King's Foundation, the most beautiful museum space in the world, and a reported source of inspiration for his first Dior collection. Lipinski adds more names to the list without hesitation: Demna Gvasalia's Balenciaga, shaped by Berlin's club scene; Saint Laurent's runway show at the Neue Nationalgalerie; Stefano Pilati, who didn't just visit Berlin but relocated there. So why doesn't the city get credit? Lipinski traces it back to temperament as much as strategy, "the rather reserved and modest mentality that Germans tend to have." Changing that is now part of the job description: delegation trips to Seoul and Tokyo to build presence in South Korea and Japan, and a new showroom in the works for Paris Fashion Week, designed to put German fashion directly in front of the industry rather than waiting to be discovered.

A translator between fashion and politics

Few fashion executives move as comfortably through government ministries as Lipinski does, but he resists the idea that this makes him unusual. As Chairman of the European Fashion Alliance, which he co-founded, and which now represents 29 member organisations and more than 10,000 companies, he sees the skill as core to the job itself, not a personal talent. "We're all translators," he says of himself and his peers, name-checking Carlo Capasa of the Camera Nazionale and Pascal Morand of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode as fellow examples.

"We translate the language of fashion into politics and the language of politics into fashion." It's a role built on making a fragmented, wildly diverse industry legible to the people who fund and regulate it, and, more importantly, keeping SMEs from getting lost in that translation. His approach starts with naming the fragmentation outright: making visible that the industry is built from companies of vastly different sizes and specialties, and treating that diversity as a structural strength rather than an obstacle.

Where 29 members disagree, and where they don't

An alliance spanning France's defense of luxury, Italy's craftsmanship and Germany's sustainability focus inevitably runs into friction. Lipinski deflects the obvious tension with a joke: the closest thing to real disagreement, he says, is picking between a French, Italian, German, Portuguese or Polish restaurant for the next dinner. But behind the humor is a genuine point: despite different sizes and priorities, EFA members "meet as equals," and keep discovering that the issues they face, especially at the EU policy level, are shared far more often than not.

Dismantling the Berghain stereotype

Pressed on the biggest misconception about German fashion, he goes straight for Berlin's reputation as a city of "black clubwear." He doesn't deny the connection between fashion and club culture, some collections, he admits, "would fit right into Berghain," but insists a single glance at Berlin Fashion Week dismantles the stereotype. What actually defines the city's fashion identity, he says, is diversity, not a single aesthetic.

History, not trends

Asked to name a fashion trend he'd like to see disappear, he declines outright, on principle: his role is to support designers' creative freedom, not to sit in judgment of it. He's far more animated talking about the past than policing the present. He singles out fashion historian Gesa Kessemeier, whose book "Modestadt Berlin" spent ten years recovering the names of designers erased from public memory, part of a thriving, innovative couture scene in early twentieth-century Berlin that was destroyed under the Nazis and largely forgotten since. It's a history he wants told more forcefully, alongside the funding and mentoring initiatives already supporting today's generation of German designers.

Personal, not performative

The interview's lighter moments reveal just as much. On his own personal uniform, Lipinski nods to Marilyn Monroe's famous line about wearing nothing but Chanel No. 5 to bed, then declines to top it, keeping his own answer to himself. And when asked for his favorite designer, he skips runway names altogether for a childhood memory: a jumper his mother knitted for him as a child, "I LOVE MOMMY" stitched across the back in large letters. She still sends him hand-knitted sweaters today, "although fortunately they've become a little less outspoken over the years."

Berlin's place in Europe's fashion future

On where Berlin fits among Paris, Milan and London, Lipinski doesn't stage a rivalry, he refuses one. He's genuinely admiring of the three capitals, calling them "incredibly strong," each with distinctive strengths and expertise worth respecting on their own terms. But he extends the same logic to everyone else, encouraging Madrid, Bucharest and Copenhagen not to measure themselves against the establishment either, and citing EFA partner Flanders DC's recent fashion festival in Antwerp as proof of what happens when a scene builds on its own DNA instead of chasing someone else's. It's the same thesis that runs through the entire conversation: Germany's fashion industry was never missing talent, ambition or influence, just the confidence, and the platform, to say so out loud.