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What do people in Berlin have against "non-Berlin" styles?
Since coming back, I'm working for the government and private companies + I'm in the middle of post grad, so I try to wear a lot more "neat" and "timeless" things now. Nothing fancy, but things that make me feel professional but also flexible enough for being casual since I also often go straight from work to different social events or sports. Dark/black jeans, nice button downs and sweaters, things like that. I find myself staying away from hyper feminine dresses or skirts that I used to wear before moving back because I just sort of noticed that not a lot of people wear them, and when I was first interviewing for jobs at private companies, I felt like I was getting a super, super weird vibe from my female interviewers for looking so "clean". I don't even wear heavy make-up or anything; at most I wear mascara and chapstick, and I even get a lot of snarky comments about wearing red lipstick.
I find myself in this weird place where I panic and feel like I have to go thrift shopping to find the outfits that aren't only professional, but also "berlin professional" which is odd because sometimes I meet people in the space that I work in that make me feel like I'm not rich enough to afford the brands that are formal enough, but I also feel like in social spaces around Berlin in general that I somehow need to "dress-down" to make myself look more poor, but it's actually insane because thrift stores are selling second-hand clothes for €40 (sometimes up to €200?!) while I've also seen stores all around Kreuzberg and Mitte selling "business comfortable" (designer joggers and hoodies for over a hundred bucks!) all over the city. I'm also just not really into the "poverty-chic" aesthetic because I'm from a low-income family to begin with, and I just can't really wrap my head around buying things that already look worn (and of course all of my old clothes don't fit the style at all!)
I feel like since I've gone and come back, fashion standards are a lot more stringent than they used to be, or is that just me?
Another side of this is, oddly enough, I haven't had much trouble with clubs when I venture out to one. Although, I am a POC with a very curly afro, so when I wear something vaguely strappy with huge hoop earrings, I never have a problem getting in even if I've barely put any effort into my appearance at all (usually expecting that I'm wasting my time anyways). KitKat, Renate, and Sisyphos often reject my friends while they're standing right next to me and clearly have put much more effort into their "vibes" than I have, and I actually find myself frustrated because I feel like I'm somehow capitalizing on a diversity dividend by just existing in my natural state. It's a very weird complaint (woe is me, right?), but I feel like I'm held to a very different standard in a lot of diverse spaces than my friends are (which often works to my benefit). E.g. someone will shit all over me for being dressed "too nicely" and looking "too uptight" but then accept me into the space anyways because they apparently love my vibe. I feel like that's a very Berlin-specific microaggression that I keep encountering... or am I crazy?
There's a practical side to this that doesn't get said enough: Berlin professional dress codes are basically set by the nonprofit, culture, and startup sectors, and those sectors skew heavily toward "I rode my bike here" as a status signal. Government offices (Senatsverwaltung, Bezirksamt) are actually the opposite, people there dress quite conventional and nobody blinks at a blazer or a proper dress. So if your interviews were at private companies with a young-ish team, that "clean" vibe you got was probably less about Berlin in general and more about that specific milieu where looking polished reads as either sales or management, neither of which they trust.
On the thrift thing, Kreuzberg and Mitte are tourist-priced now. If you want actual cheap second-hand, go to the Humana on Frankfurter Allee or the smaller shops out in Neukölln around Karl-Marx-Straße, or honestly the Sunday flea markets like Mauerpark are only worth it before 10am. And you're not imagining the "dress-down to seem poor" pressure, it's real but it's very neighborhood-specific. In Charlottenburg or Zehlendorf nobody cares if you look like you have money.
The POC/afro thing at clubs, I don't think you're crazy and I also don't think it's a microaggression aimed at you, it's the door policy being inconsistent and racialized in ways that happen to
honestly people here just have a thing about looking like u tried too hard. berlin "style" is basically pretending you didnt think about it at all. drives me nuts too.
What is the correct spelling for a street name that appears differently on multiple signs in Charlottenburg?
Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.
if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point
honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.
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