COLOUR, RIPS AND THE "BORROWED" LOOK DEFINE THE NEW STREETWEAR

       Pre-washed jeans and a bright shirt or T-shirt: Street wear styles are colourful. Tops should have some flash and shirts canb e plaid, but no matter what ther has to be some colour.
       Designer Stefan Dietzelt observes a parade of trend-crazy people every day through the shop window of his streetwear clothing store in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg.
       "Th item that has sold really well is this short-sleeved shirt for men," he says, referring to a shirt with white watering cans on a red background.
       Red as in fresh, orange-red. It must have somethign to do with the hue, he adds.
       Other T-shirts hav large colourful shapes overlapping one another. The shades are frequently neon. Graphic print patterns also are in style.
       All are being combined with ragged jeans that "must look destroyed", says Karl-Heinz Mueller, director of Berlin's streetwear trade fair Bread and Butter.
       "And the more beat-up the material, the more expensive the jeans. The expensive brands have the destruction done by hand," he explains. This achieves an impression of authenticity.
       He describes the current street style as "masculine". Young men are selecting worn jeans combined with plaid shirts or T-shirts. An example can be found in the Forvert collection.
       Young women, meanwhile, are wearing jeans and shirts in "boyfriend style', says Mueller, who also runs a streetwear shop in central Berlin.
       This is when jeans look too big, as if they've been borrowed from a friend. As a counter trend, there also are leggings and tube jeans. A jersey dress, such as one found in the Dickies line, looks flattering with them.
       Marc Lohausen of the online streetwear store Frontline in Hanover has an answer to the "boyfriend look" trend: clothing for women intentionally cut not to fit properly.
       It's the way a woman would look if she just rolled out of bed and put on her boyfriend's pants and shirt befor heading out to get breakfast. The clothes are loose, wide and sit low on the hips. Nikita jeans are an example.
       The collection also demonstrates the colour tred: Bright, happy colours are the Nikita trademark. yellow, coral and light mint are listed in the collection's description.
       Worn with it are walking shoes in 1980s styles or ankle-high basketball shoes in hip-hop style, syas Lohausen. The colours can lso mimic those that were pouplar in the '80s: purple, yellow, light blue and pink.
       A lot of the shoes are in cotton or canvas and look a little square at first glance, as if they were somethign taken from an American college movie. But the spirit of the style is different because of the cool colours they have, syas Lohausen.
       They match the bright neon colours that highlight outfits that have been specially selected. There are light, sun-yellow jersey clothes, for example, from bench. Ther also are neon-grphic printed T-shirts and sky blue training jackets.
       "Very strong at the moment is something called Adicolor by Adidas Originals. These are basically training suits from the 1970s in neon yellow, green and light blue," syas Lohausen.
       With these, trend-conscious people have to get used to very old tailoring that has become new again.