There are tried and tested ways to launch a new car. Take a load of journalists to a hot and sunny place, put them up in the best hotel in town and offer them an endless supply of food and drink seems to be the established route, but hardly the most imaginative perhaps? After all, you can just see the world-weary hacks being unable to remember one launch from the next, blurring people-carriers in Cannes with supercars in Sardinia.

So you have to hand it to Chevrolet trying something a bit different with their soon-to-be-launched Spark. It’s a cheeky-looking car, sure enough, and along with the equally new but much larger Cruze marks a new face of Chevrolet in the UK; still good-value, but now good-looking as well. And there’s clearly something in the water that Chevrolet’s European team drink…

The setting was Berlin Fashion Week and the stage was the Chevrolet Young Creative awards night. I walked in to the venue brimming with confidence, video camera to hand but within minutes felt extremely old and dull as everyone seemed to be either nineteen years old, or nineteen years old and wearing clothes so cutting-edge it almost hurt. I tell a lie actually: there were older people there, but they all looked like George Clooney so that didn’t help. A very bleak prospect for your correspondent.

Such petty thoughts were soon put aside though as I started to look at the entries, the quality of which was astounding. And then you realise that the whole shebang is sponsored by a global car company and not a fashion house. Chevrolet will of course garner publicity and credibility from the project, but they’ve also given some young kids the chance to make a name for themselves and collect perhaps the first of many trophies for the mantlepiece. It’s an enlightened strategy.

So what about our Spark then, in all its diminutive glory? Chevrolet decided to hand one over to Mischa Woeste of the Smeilinener label and it’s probably fair to say that what same back would have raised a few eyebrows at the monthly Chevrolet marketing meeting. Even the Spark’s designer, who was on hand for the evening, looked a trifle stunned, but then he started laughing. At least I think it was laughter.

So when you see your first Spark on the road, you might just smile too as thoughts of sequins and Dulux flash before your eyes…

This piece written by Paul Harmer (Content Director for Women and Wheels) as Kate was away on half-term and couldn’t make the trip to Berlin!