29 June, 2006
From the catalog: „In Sachen: c.neeon“, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Museum of Decorative Arts, The National Museums in Berlin)
An interview about design in germany‘s east and west with Elke Giese, expert for trends for the german fashion institut (DMI) and Joachim Schirrmacher, editor – in – chief of the european fashion magazine »style in progress« by Prof. Dr. Heik Afheldt
Heik Afheldt: Mrs. Giese, Mr. Schirrmacher, we picked you for this conversation, first of all, because both of you have been studying German design theory for quite some time, but also because each of you probably follows events from a different point of view, or at least you have in the past. As someone from a somewhat different line of business, perhaps a general question to start: What were the specific profiles of “East” and “West” in design and in creative production? Today it’s almost strange—perhaps part of a nostalgia for the East—how so many designers with East German identities are winning so many prizes. Is that chance, or is there a causal connection?
Joachim Schirrmacher: At our foundation it’s been the case that we’ve seen a remarkable number of good applications for the European Design Prize—which we award—coming from East Germany. We received 165 entries from 10 countries, and in the end we chose five of them: one from Switzerland and four from East Germans, or from West Germans who’d studied in eastern Germany. And of course we asked ourselves too: Hold on, what’s going on here?
In Apolda, too, the winner was a woman from Thuringia, Christina Schneider, who’s now with “Akris.” Another example of the trend you describe is provided by the East German magazine Das Magazin. One of its recent cover stories was called “Province Couture.” The story was about designers who were living in cities like Jena or Weimar, instead of dreaming of Paris. Perhaps one more example: To promote business in Thuringia they’ve launched a project entitled “Vivienne Eastwoods.”
Elke Giese: Well, what you say is certainly true. Yet one detects a certain degree of wishful thinking as well. For me, these supposed trends only become interesting when there’s a real point of reference: for example, when the Grand Prix in Hyères is awarded. That’s a fixed reference point with none of the “soft-focus” view of the East one sees so often.
Schirrmacher: But for me, that reference value already exists. Obviously there is quality here. Clearly, a specifically East German design is capable of holding its own against the competition and winning. And these are the designers we’re talking about. Of course this also becomes a phenomenon that the media picks up on.
Afheldt: But how do we explain this? Is it due to a certain type of training, perhaps one found only in the academies of the new federal lands? Take the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee for example. An interesting construct arose there after reunification, because it was resolved to replace part of the faculty. Half of the faculty was recruited from the old federal lands while the other half consisted of the old established professors. Did this perhaps create a tension that can be seen in today’s design?
Giese: Certainly. I do think there’s a very specific type of conditioning in school, in education, that is complemented by experiences from one’s upbringing or one’s individual surroundings. But just to be clear: Are you asking whether new principles have been created, or are you interested in the specific differences between the two schools of design theory?
Afheldt: Well, I’m moving back along the causal chain. If we say that a high level of quality emerged after reunification, then that must surely have something to do with the fact that something new was obviously created at certain schools where these two cultures interacted. Do you see the same connection?
Schirrmacher: Generally speaking, I think good schools are always good schools of thought as well. Naturally, students are shaped by their teachers. One also speaks of schools of painting, and so on. My explanation for this development is that the friction—a conscious grappling with one’s own experience—is much stronger in East Germany. In that sense, whether you’re a West German studying in Halle or an East German studying at Berlin-Weißensee is not so critical. Rather, what’s important is where your priorities are in life. You have to confront yourself much more intensively when your material comfort has been torn away. This illusion that “someday I’ll be a star designer walking on the red carpet”—I don’t believe this exists there. I had a conversation with Christina Schneider prior to this discussion. And she said to me that she’s always been conscious of the fact that she’s from East Germany. She was in the seventh grade when the Wall came down…
Afheldt: …But what was the difference for her? Where did it show up?
Schirrmacher: It was undoubtedly more of a psychological factor, and not a concrete perception of poverty or loss, of course. It’s probably better understood as something formative. A realization that says: If I want to accomplish anything, then I have to go somewhere else. I have to keep achieving more; I can’t just stay in Hamburg. And I think that kind of thinking is extremely formative. What the students from Halle tell me as well is that the professors there place a great deal of value on individual expression. I also noticed this at a show in Karlsruhe, at the presentation of the “Contemporary Fashion Archives” (CFA), where, for the first time, six German schools of fashion came together to put on a combined show. And they really tried out some new things; it wasn’t just the deconstructionists and the Japanese on view, but rather things one really wanted to buy. Finally, something different for a change. Many of the schools were from the new federal lands. And I have the feeling that one examines one’s own identity and one’s own product in a much more intensive way there.
Afheldt: But from a superficial point of view, one might say that any attempt to explain things in terms of the positive influence of GDR design falls flat in this context. After all, the official dogmatism must have prevented any attempts at creative, individual problem-solving. Unless you say that something was pent up by this dogmatism over time, something that is now unfolding.
Giese: Well, I’d put it a bit differently. Of course I can only speak for my own generation. For me, East German design instruction and the attitudes in the institutions I later worked for were always thoroughly ideological.
Afheldt: And you’ve already mentioned that your first collection was a collection of work uniforms. That seems like a perfect example in this context…
Giese: …In any case, there was a statement about this that was issued when the fashion institute was founded. In those days the desire was to create a fashion of one’s own. That meant there was a particular morality, and the desire was to see it linked to fashion. Superficial “chic” was a characteristic of the enemy; clothing had to be functional, first and foremost. After the fall of the Wall, and also before, I was always shocked to see things like pocket flaps that were attached purely for show. Of course it was frowned upon to fake something that wasn’t really there. Because we didn’t have that material comfort, that wealth, we had to fall back on the root, the reality, the function. And the teachers conceived that as a substitute too. Anyone who wanted to deal with beauty couldn’t really be against luxury. And so this “withdrawal” was also a coming to terms with want, and we made our own ideology out of that. We said, we’ll create a brown-paper culture, and some of the materials we were working with at that time were dyed work fabrics. The results were shown in the art section of the 10th GDR Art Exhibition, because commercially speaking, they simply didn’t work. But as I said, in the normal apparel industry, functionality was always a top priority. And this certainly gave us a solid grounding in being able to do things thoroughly, to think them through completely and not add a loop or a frill somewhere just for show. That all had to do with how the state regarded itself in general. At the fashion institute, when we created design samples, lots of things were rejected. The section head would say, that’s not what our women want; that’s not what our women desire. And things were rejected out of practical considerations as well. We were told, a skirt must also function when you’re boarding a streetcar, and our models weren’t suited for that. So when you have that sort of one-class society, when you live in a nation of workers, farmers and clerks, then you know what our design theory was like back then.
Schirrmacher: And meanwhile this aspect seems to have been rather underappreciated in West German design. Both of you are very much in contact with the German industry. I find the industry to be far too self-centered, even today. In this context, the customer is the retailer, not the woman. I think the consumer is far beyond the industry in terms of fashion. Also in terms of changes in women’s image. Why is Scandinavian fashion so interesting, for instance? This problem of “boarding the streetcar,” all of that is considered up there. Or the story of the folding bicycle from London, all that has its effect on design, and yet I still want to look good too. That’s one part of it. But also the attitude with which fashion has been created and is still created today. The whole mindset that makes the entire business so incredibly tiresome, where one always has to go on a charm offensive before one can speak about fashion at all. That’s my personal experience.
Giese: I want to add one more thing. One other category that characterized fashion design in the GDR was improvisation. One wanted to stand out, and that was only possible by means of creative improvisation. For example, I bought myself Chinese workers’ uniforms and then dyed and embroidered them. I tried to alienate the item that way, because the direct path—to buy a pair of jeans, for example—did not exist. So you had to take detours.
Schirrmacher: That would have been another substantial difference from the West German experience. Nonetheless one must point out that perceptions in the West were ideologically colored as well. Of course this is conveyed in books like Generation Golf by Florian Illies: this image of the affluent society. My parents had a house too. But my grandmother lived on the ground floor, and my parents had a 27-square-meter apartment upstairs. My siblings split the rest. That’s almost inconceivable by today’s standards. And still there persists in people’s minds this apparent reality of extremely well-to-do children, an image that was probably represented solely by Florian Illies and his circle.
Afheldt: I’d like to come back to something you said earlier, Frau Giese: these ideological commandments in fashion. That tight corset was also apparent in architecture, of course. I found that bewildering. There was an ideology that exerted a certain fascination, perhaps, at a certain age. And then you drive through the cities, through Halle for example, and not only was boarding the streetcar awkward, despite all the functionality, because you had to step up so high, but on top of that everything was so ugly and run-down. So of course one asks oneself what kind of value was placed on design in a society like that. The idea that it may not necessarily be proper to call attention to a working woman with colorful fashion—that may be understandable. But that the general design of the environment and of utilitarian objects should have been so neglected, although it’s actually intimately bound up with the basic premise of socialism—that I still don’t understand.
Giese: That was one of those things that indicated the mendacity of the entire state. It had nothing to do with the basic premise. If you look at Wandlitz, for instance, then you understand very clearly the value placed on design. Of course there were schools like Weißensee and Giebichenstein, and there were the intellectuals. But the GDR didn’t think much of its intellectuals; instead it made top officials out of those who conformed to a very petit bourgeois spirit. At Weißensee you have a wonderful professor of design theory, Hirdina. He’s an excellent person to talk to about the development of GDR design. Early on, the Bauhaus group was still there. But later all you had to do was look at an appliance shop and you could see how things were moving further and further away from that, becoming ever more petit bourgeois, ever more narrow-minded. The gap between the basic premise—that is, what one wanted to be—and the reality was vast.
Schirrmacher: That makes me think of the book Wo Deutschland liegt – Eine Ortsbestimmung, by Günther Gaus. It’s the source of the quote I picked out for this conversation: “The biggest source of the unease felt by West Germans traveling in the GDR [lies] in the unadulterated evidence of a petit bourgeois approach to life, in mentalities that essentially have nothing to do with the political system of the GDR and its economic hardships, but rather with the fact that it is the so-called common people who—quite unselfconsciously—set the tone of public-private life in terms of style, in terms of taste. What’s disturbing is the encounter with habits and forms of daily life uninformed by the allure of something higher, the upward impulse.” And, one might add, the allure of something more beautiful.
Afheldt: No doubt the allure of distinction as well.
Giese: Distinction—that has to be the critical term in this context.
Afheldt: But when you take a closer look at that quote, then you’re forced to conclude that the avant-garde of design and creative production was located in the West, and the East was dominated by a single color: gray. That was true for fashion…
Schirrmacher: In the minds of the public at least…
Afheldt: And it was also true of the objects in one’s environment. But now, if we view the present in this light, it becomes all the more astounding, assuming we stick to the hypothesis that a combination of Eastern influences and Western influences has led to this present success. Unless we ask: Didn’t the hardships liberate the creative powers as well?
Giese: I’d be very careful with that. I read that book too. My father-in-law smuggled it into the GDR in 1983. We all took it quite hard; of course we didn’t want to see ourselves that way. I recently reread it and would recommend it to anyone. It does a wonderful job of describing all the irritations. But still I’d be careful about making such a general statement. The only thing in East Germany that was particularly appealing and perhaps still is today is that people didn’t think in terms of “making an impression.” Instead perhaps the dominant pattern is what one might describe as thinking in terms of limitations, or to be more specific, perhaps, as a thinking founded in the limitation of functionality. That’s the only positive aspect I would mention. Apart from that I’m not at all nostalgic, and certainly not for the East. There’s nothing worth saving.
Schirrmacher: But the things we’ve seen in recent years have been very modern. They’re sporty, they’re very dynamic…
Giese: But they don’t necessarily include any element of the East…
Schirrmacher: No, not necessarily. But the attitude with which the things were made. Two aspects occur to me. First, I think West Germans have a completely different way of engaging with design, just because of the way they’ve been socialized. We’ve already talked about that. The other is the concept of empiricism, of perception, how the formation of this concept varies. Think of the most successful fashion director we have at the moment. It’s Maria van den Bosch from H&M. If the readers of Bunte or InStyle were to meet this woman in the flesh, they’d never believe she was H&M’s fashion designer. What line of work would they think she was in?
Giese: Anything but fashion.
Schirrmacher: Anything but something glamorous. Lots of people live exclusively through their perceptions. And for these people, the cosmos of the designers consists of champagne glasses and luxury.
Afheldt: Mr. Schirrmacher, you said something earlier that we should come back to. It was about the idea that it’s the retailer who’s important in the textile industry of the West, and not the customer. Is this to be seen as another difference from East German culture? And, building on that, could it be that yet another difference is the value placed on marketing?
Schirrmacher: The difference is certainly there. But there are also behaviors among the designers themselves that give rise to this problem. Basically I see two different types: Either the designer wants to make his own thing, with which he can then earn money. Or the other type only wants to do things in order to earn a lot of money.
Afheldt: In closing, let’s get back to discussing the schools again. With fashion, as with many other things that are taught in design school, we’re dealing, after all, with a very artisanal phenomenon. And in that regard, the quality and reliability of the workshops plays a major role. Hence the question about infrastructures. And I have the impression that both in the East and in the West, the preconditions that once existed everywhere have now died off almost completely because of their cost. What do you think?
Schirrmacher: I find the term “artisanal” problematic in this context. When you say “artisanal,” it sounds as though the designer makes everything himself. For me, design is a combination of craft and management. The designer must be familiar with the processes in order to get the best results out of those who execute them. Kriemler von Arkris knows exactly how that goes, and he pushes his work desperately in order to achieve a top-quality product.
Afheldt: Still, familiarity with materials is a decisive criterion…
Schirrmacher: It’s certainly a part of it. But later on he won’t have to sew everything himself. In my opinion, design needs to stay close to the workshop because this gives rise to inspiration, and also chance occurrences. Because you see it a certain way, “no, make it a different way, this way works too.” And this experimentation no longer exists here because we hardly have any production here anymore. The big designers are going to countries where the wages are low, and so the design offices threaten to move to Asia too, because there they’re back at the site of production. What is there in that to build on? The success of the Antwerp school of fashion is due in part to the fact that the Belgian manufacturers have pledged to manufacture the designers’ things locally.
Giese: I’d like to argue one point with you. Earlier you said that quality is more likely to result when the designer does not primarily want to make money. But that’s wrong. Everyone has to want to make money; otherwise they couldn’t continue to produce. That’s the prerequisite for their continuing to work at all. Every new design trend has to want to make money; it has to perfect its marketing and fulfill the requirements of commercial viability. Otherwise the designer can spend three seasons making fashion and end up with a pile of debts. We mustn’t romanticize that.
Schirrmacher: You’re absolutely right. I meant the difference more in the sense of: Type One wants to be creative first, then commercially successful; and Type Two creates a label and is proudest when a celebrity wears his stuff. Those are totally different principles.
Giese: Yes, that’s true. But for me, the problem of generalization always persists. First it was: Everything that comes from the East simply won’t do. And then a while ago it shifted, and suddenly it’s the root of all good. I think there’s always an individual story hidden behind every design. What are you capable of, what do you bring to the table, how open are you. No one can shed their roots—that’s completely normal.
Schirrmacher: But still, it really is important where you’re from. Design always takes place in a context. It can hold you back or push you forward in all kinds of ways.
Afheldt: Nonetheless I feel the need to note in closing: Even if it’s impossible to determine what is East and what is West in every ramification of today’s design, the phenomenon still remains interesting. My closing question: What do you think about the fact that a design group as young as c.neeon is allowed to have a show in a museum?
Giese: I think it’s good. It encourages the young people. Enables them to present themselves with a certain gravity. It brings publicity. I also think it reflects well on the directors of the museum that they took up that cause. At last someone is dealing with the present and the future as well, and not just the past. Putting that on a good footing—that’s my wish for the future.
Schirrmacher: In addition, I would wish for the show to be free of museumization. Because the discourse on fashion is quite heavily influenced by non-fashion people. Art historians, especially, who certainly contribute interesting things but often narrowly miss the point as well. And a near miss is still a miss. The commercial aspects—without which design would be unthinkable—are also important, as are the ecology and economy of design. Today you can’t print textiles here in Germany if you fail to meet certain environmental standards. That’s often forgotten. So I hope that perhaps this complexity will be portrayed as well, and not just the result. And I also hope that no more abstruse conclusions will be drawn here; that’s my wish for these two.
Afheldt: Mrs. Giese, Mr. Schirrmacher, thank you for talking with us.
Published
Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Museum of Decorative Arts, The National Museums in Berlin) (Ed.) „In Sachen: c.neeon“, Berlin 2006, p. 50 – 63
