The weekend, from the organisers of SubRosaDictum parties, consists of a Meet & Greet on Friday,  the Avantgardista Showroom, Fashion Shows and Space Intruders party on Saturday, and Designers’ Breakfast on Sunday.

Friday’s Meet & Greet (8pm-midnight) has reverted to being hotel-based after last year’s experimental combining of it with an opening pre-party for the Avantgardista Showroom at the main venue.

This year’s Saturday Showroom will be open from midday to midnight, with the fashion shows taking place 7–9pm and the SubRosaDictum Space Intruders party starting in the venue next door at 10pm (overlapping the showroom event by two hours) and running until 4am.

Avantgardista 2019 will close with the Designers’ Breakfast (more of a brunch really) between 11am and 3pm at the hotel.

The Meet & Greet at partner hotel Motel One is free to attend. But as for the ticketed events, the official website’s ticketing page (see screenshot, above right) is showing everything sold out except for the basic Showroom-only tickets for Saturday (which do not include admission to the fashion shows).

The ticketing page indicates that there are waiting lists you can join for all the ‘sold out’ events, except for the €15 combined Showroom/Fashion Shows, whose waiting list has been disabled.

This year’s list of participating designers runs to 20 brands — of which more than a dozen are German labels. No UK designers are taking part this time.

If you’ve missed out on Avantgardista tickets for this year, or just want to see what the Munich weekend is all about, the videos (above and below) from Avantgardista 2018 in this October Video Special will give you a pretty good flavour of the event.

Last year there were more than 100 models in the shows and around 30 participating brands. So many brands bought catwalk slots that the shows ran to a total duration of three hours (with a short interval). 

With only two-thirds as many brands involved this year, it looks like Avantgardista’s organisers have taken on board criticism that the 2018 runway show went on way too long. In which case our 2018 Fashion Show Video might well turn out to be a record of a unique moment in fetish history.

But don’t worry — it’s not three hours long! Our event cameraman and video editor Nikdesign 

For many in its audience, the twin highlights of the 2018 show will have been the return of ExxEss Latex (in collaboration with Catasta Charisma), and the Avantgardista debut of Tokyo label Kurage.

Peter Monochrome, our Swedish video team’s regular presenter, was able to grab Kurage designer Kid’o (Shigenari Kido) for a quick chat on camera before his catwalk show.

In it, Kid’o reveals that he will show a different style — “the beginning of new Kurage style. More elegant, more simple.”

Asked what inspires his designs, he says he always makes outfits starting from the head. “Actually my fetish is for the eyes” he explains.

Kurage began to become well-known internationally about five years ago after starting to do fashion shows at some of the West’s big fetish events. 

But, reveals Kid’o, his label has actually been around for 15 years, and he was originally inspired by the possibilities of latex some 25 years ago when he saw a copy of Marquis magazine, whose publisher Peter Czernich he is now collaborating with.

“I’m making outfits with Peter,” he says. “He has many ideas. He will say, ‘Next time, I want to do da-da-da… ’ And I’ll say, ‘OK I will make that’!”

When our presenter asks him if he remembers the first garments he made in latex, Kid’o says he’ll show us — and you can see the images he shared in the video.