Twenty years of METAL called for more than one celebration. After Madrid and Barcelona, last Thursday we landed at Jansz. Garden for our first activation in Amsterdam, as part of the official Amsterdam Fashion Week programme, together with our main partner, Pulitzer Amsterdam. It marked the beginning of a new chapter with a city whose creative scene we have been watching closely for years. And we’re certainly not alone: brands, agencies and international players have increasingly been turning their attention towards Amsterdam too.
Fashion weeks have a curious relationship with time. Months of preparation end up compressed into a few days of running from one place to another, checking your phone far too often and promising people you will definitely catch up properly later. So, right in the middle of one of the busiest days of the week, we decided to do precisely the opposite. From 6 pm, we gathered with a very simple plan: have a drink, put faces to names, connect and celebrate with some of the people shaping the city’s creative scene.
We’ve followed and covered Amsterdam Fashion Week in previous editions, but this year, as we had already announced, things felt different. For the first time, METAL became an active part of its official programme, surrounded by brands bringing plenty of new ideas to the table. And not only through runway shows. Presentations, dinners, parties and unexpected formats have become some of the week’s greatest strengths, taking over different corners of Amsterdam and connecting a scene shaped by different cultures, disciplines and perspectives. That mix is precisely what makes the city so interesting to us.
Having Pulitzer Amsterdam by our side for this first step made particular sense. Calling it simply the location of Thursday’s gathering wouldn’t do justice to its role in the collaboration, or to what the hotel represents within the city. Spread across its historic canal houses, Pulitzer has become one of those places where things happen, where different creative communities cross paths and where a coffee, a dinner or a drink can unexpectedly turn into the beginning of something else. Jansz. Garden, hidden away from the rush outside, gave us exactly what we needed for a couple of hours: somewhere to stop.
And finding time to stop is no small thing in this industry. We’re already working non-stop on our next print issue, which we hope to share very soon with many of the people we met last Thursday, and our calendars are showing no signs of slowing down. But after twenty years, we’ve learnt that celebrating is also part of the job. Sometimes you need to shut the laptop, leave the next deadline until tomorrow and raise a glass to what’s already happened.
By then, Jansz. Garden was full of designers and photographers, stylists and models, content creators and editors, alongside representatives from brands and agencies and some of the city’s best-connected creative figures. Some were old friends, others we had been speaking to by email for months, while quite a few we were finally meeting for the first time.
Among those who came by to celebrate with us were Ivan Ugrin, Eloise van Oranje, Levi Nguyen, Nico Zulatto and Tuyk Dider van Dam, alongside María Mota and Daan van der Lecq, Elena Cavagnara and Rogier Alexander, Eliana Casa and Julia Mitereva, Philippe Pourhashemi and Maaike Klaasen, Annemarijn van der Kolk and Michiel van Maaren, Samuel Puyol and Zulu Green, to name just a few of the many people who joined us throughout the evening. A huge thank you to everyone who came by and made room for us on what we know was one of the busiest days of the week.
We can talk about networking and building creative communities as much as we like, but sometimes it really is as simple as getting everyone into the same garden and seeing what happens. Conversations moved from the shows we had seen that week to how Amsterdam’s creative landscape is evolving, the role Amsterdam Fashion Week is playing in connecting its different scenes and how spaces such as Pulitzer can help those communities meet. We also came back to something that feels increasingly important: independent magazines, brands, creatives and cultural spaces need to keep finding ways of supporting each other.
What happened last Thursday only confirmed why we had wanted to make this move for some time. Amsterdam has an energetic, culturally diverse creative community with plenty to say, and this first activation gave us the opportunity to get closer to it and start conversations we hope will continue well beyond Fashion Week.
Amsterdam, we’ll see you again soon. And as we have already warned you a few times this year, there’s plenty more to come!
