16 February, 2010
A review of German fashion history. Fashion is closely linked to identity. However, it was almost unable to evolve in Germany because of its chequered history. The question of German identity was only resolved with reunification in 1990. Immediately fashion in Germany began to thrive.
By Joachim Schirrmacher
Fashion is always also a reflection of society, it plays with identities and traditions and at the same time realizes current trends. What characterizes fashion from Germany? Which directions do designers take? What influences their work? Insights into the history of German fashion.
For centuries the members of the aristocracy were the driving force of fashion. They competed for the favour of kings and emperors with elaborate dress at court. Above all, the French court at Versailles set the tone – for the whole of Europe. This tradition still influences French fashion today.
The situation was very different in Germany. Because of the many historical up heavals and the multitude of different states – in 1856 there were still 30 autonomous German states – and the lack of one great royal family it was impossible for a single dominant fashion to evolve. On the contrary, as a result of German Romanticism and the asceticism of the Protestants there was a long tradition of disdain for external conventions.
Berlin – a flagship of style
The change came in 1871 with the foundation of the German Empire and the choice of Berlin as capital city. Numerous fashion salons and clothing firms were set up in the area around Hausvogteiplatz, above all by members of the Jewish community. Soon afterwards the Berlin style arose, which reach its climax during the Golden 1920s. At that time German women were among the most elegant in Europe. In 1933, following the seizure of power by the National Socialists, this first short blossoming of German fashion came to an abrupt end.
Lifestyle Propaganda
As Irene Guenther writes in her book Nazi Chic?, the National Socialists imposed a folkish-nationalistic mother image on the general population based on folk costumes, traditional wrap-around plaits and no make-up. The Jewish entrepreneurs and workers left National Socialist Germany or were murdered in the concentration camps. The fact that there were also haute couture shows for the Nazi elite is nowadays largely forgotten. The modern woman, writes Irene Guenther, was used as an instrument of lifestyle propaganda. Everyday aesthetics and design, parades and torchlight processions, staged events and scenery were deliberately used by the Nazis to satisfy the popular desire for identification, community, entertainment and beauty. “Under the dictate of politics, the Nazis developed the first capitalist mass culture on European soil,” writes Beat Schneider, the Swiss expert on design theory. “It was consciously employed by the Nazis as a means of deceiving and binding the masses under their rule.”
Convention and Commerce
After the Second World War coats were tailored out of uniforms and dresses out of parachutes and everything became fossilized in convention and etiquette. After responsibility for the Holocaust German society sought composure, wanted to liberate itself from the agony and the stigma of barbarism through good manners. When combined with the criticism of the leading thinkers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, who viewed culture and therefore fashion as a ware, and the anti-establishment attitude of the 1968 movement, this led to a pervasive distrust of fashion and style. “That’s commercialism” is an ar gument that is still heard even today in intellectual debate.
Additionally, until the Federal Government moved from Bonn to Berlin in 1999 there was no social centre in Germany where fashion could develop.
Egalitarianism instead of Elite
In Germany there was no tradition of raising your head above the crowd, the majority preferred to hide as part a uniform mass: “Although there are class differen ces, they should not be presented,” writes Jens Jessen in the survey on Life in Germany which appeared in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Ordinary people do not spruce themselves up like aristocrats and members of elites conceal the “attributes of their status with a sombre sense of satisfaction”. It is considered good style to dress in a conspicuously inconspicuous way.
Enriched culture
At the same time, today’s diversity began to emerge: the occupying troops from the United States, Great Britain and France brought their lifestyles and fashions like jeans and T-shirts to West Germany. Germans from the young Federal Republic began to travel – and became world champions at it. Together with exchange programmes and immigrants, books, films and music from abroad enriched German culture – first its cuisine, then people’s habits. The attraction of fashion also grew – and not only in the Federal Republic, as the recent exhibition on “Free within Limits. Fashion, Photography, Underground in the GDR 1979–89” at the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts so impressively demonstrated.
Event instead elegance
Influenced by a new generation of English fashion magazines, like ;-D and Face, and the experimental electronic music scene, young people confronted “deadly boring commercial fashion” with their zest for life – initially as rebellious teenagers, then as hippies, rockers and punks before the advent of clubwear and the techno scene. Fashion no longer involved elegance, it was an event. The clothes were loud and often unwearable: neon colours, artificial turf and shower curtains. As the front-line city of the Cold War, Berlin was a magnet for all those who wanted to escape the staid German reality. It was where trends met trash and new forms of presentation were tried out. Fashion increasingly became a conscious instrument of communication, differentiation and orientation.
Be German, but be locker
Until reunification in 1990, what happened abroad was the major influence on many German fashion designers. If you wanted to find your identity, you travelled far away – preferably to the United States. Yet the increasing distance to their own history also allowed Germans to rediscover their country. Instead of being ashamed of the solidity, sobriety, functionality and workmanship, they began to recognize the advantages of their own strengths. According to an exhibition entitled “moDe! German Fashion Designers and Their Style” that Goethe-Institut presented in Tokyo in 2005, “Since reunification German fashion has acquired a new face: an indepen dent, distinctive German style.”
Urbanity, pluralism and tolerance
These changes first became apparent at the beginning of the new millennium when practically all German media highlighted this new self-confidence. In 2003 this led to the appearance of a lifestyle magazine called Deutsch, something that would have been unthinkable in the past. The editors understood “German as a synonym for urbanity, pluralism and tolerance.” This new German self-image was only acknowledged abroad during the 2006 World Cup. This international recognition inspired Germany so much that many people still talk about the “summer fairy-tale” today.
Nevertheless, even now many still consider what happens abroad to be the measure of all things, have a low opinion of their own strengths. There are very few civilized countries in which so many creative artists disown their own language and publish exclusively English websites. The question also has to be asked as to why Germany has no major image-driven fashion brands like Polo Ralph Lauren although the expertise is there. Although German fashion designers like Bernhard Willhelm or Frank Leder working with the photographer Gregor Hohenberg clearly show they can create brands that live from strong images (and without the slightest traces of nationalism, but certainly with delightful plays on German identity), there is evidently still considerable reticence about doing that in Germany.
Published/Released
Deutschland Magazin, 1/2010, “Identity and Tradition“, page 31 – 33
