With temperatures up to 37°C the brass band really had a hard job: Marching and playing was severely aggravated by the traditional costumes. Where the man have to suffer under hats with eagle dawns, the women are sweating under long black skirts.
Just across the Austrian Border, the traditional costume association “D’ Lattenberger” set up the maypole in the museum village of Grossgmain. Instead of the blue-sky-green-grass sceneries I’d like to present some details which make pretty much the essence of the procedure – which is the important thing, not the final result itself.
Oral tradition from Italy tells that once a week young boys in certain parts of Italy are made to stand on the kitchen table, while the female members of the family dance around the table and the boy, clapping their hands and shouting “Que Bello!”.
This story flashed up in the back of my mind when I saw this mannequin in the shop window, where pseudo traditional costumes are advertised for bavarian and wanna-be bavarian geeks.
Octoberfest generally is an easy place for candids, but in terms of speed, especially focusing speed with longer focal lengths, it can be demanding. But the people usually don’t object being photographed. Only inside the beer halls the breweries now imposed quite strict regulations to stop the publication of images showing drunk or half-naked customers.
I am more interested in small details like those gingerbread hearts. Last year I photographed them in the food stalls where the color is really overwhelming, especially at night when the lack of light makes it easy to direct the views. The small collection of Octoberfest posts you can find here.
Since the weekend, parts of Munich are in a state of emergency, as the Octoberfest has started. For reasons almost completely opaque to me, within 16 days up to 7 millions of national and international visitors drink approx. 5 million litres of beer in temporary beer halls while listening to to dem-idiotic music that is so loud that municipal engineers have to check that it is at least not immediately damaging the sense of hearing.
But even for the locals here the Octoberfest is still attractive and a reason to wear traditional bavarian clothing (or what designers decide to deviate from it). The lady in the image above I met in one of the attractive, now completely gentrified quarters of Munich in front of an old house, probably dating back to the 2nd half of the 19th century. The colors and cut of her dress, ‘Dirndl’, are quite traditional, without visible ingratiation on fake cottage style.
