After a pass through 1920s Berlin, across its busy fashion district and along streets packed with smartly dressed women, Franz Hessel, the citys most famous flneur, concluded: Berlin is well on its way to becoming an elegant city. Two decades earlier around 1900, another astute interpreter of metropolitan beauty, August Endell, wrote: The much criticized womens fashion is almost the only institution [in the metropolis] that is vital and dynamic today, and almost joyful to observe.
Indeed, since the later 1800s, fashion has been a persistently bright spotlight on Berlins dramatic, often crisis-ridden historical scene. Fashion has been both a large branch of the citys economy and a spirited everyday practice, but, unfortunately, also one of its best-kept secrets.
While German literary scholars and costume historians have produced numerous fascinating studies on the topic, fashion buffs outside of the German-speaking realm have, rarely paid attention to Berlin as a heart of fashion. Susan Ingram and Katrina Sarks book is thus filling up an important gap in our consciousness of way in Berlin as a major artistic and sociopolitical phenomenon of the 20th and twenty-first centuries. In its orbit and ambition, this is a pioneering work in English with a comprehensive access to the diverse aspects of public life that have constituted historically Berlins distinctive position on the international fashion scene. From the onset, the authors readily allow that Germanys capital may not be a spherical fashion center with the height of Paris, London, Tokyo, New York and Milan, but they take that Berlin is the spiritual habitation of a special form of fashion. They foretell it Berliner Chic and go to define the term for us: Berliner Chic is never limited solely to the product and presentation of trendy womens clothes; it embodies an understated flair reflected in a whole range of ethnic and urban practicesfrom movie going to exhibitions, to clubbingthat have shaped Berlins fashion identity at different historical moments in the last century.
Ingram and Sark bring Berlin into the major theoretical discussions around the connections between fashion and modernity, discussions from which the metropolis has been surprisingly missing. More than any other property in Europe, the German metropolis became synonymous with fashion, precisely as a consequence of the forces of rapid industrialization and modernization setting in some mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Paris, a city known as the heart of haute couture, the Prussian capital specialized in the output of Konfektion and conquered the globe not with charm, but with exports. Konfektion, the serially manufactured ready-to-wear apparel was affordable and sympathetic to the mass consumer. Most salons in Berlin were as much geared toward creating their own lines of high-end fashion as they were emulating Paris styles and adjusting them for a mass clientele. Since it was known that the fashion-conscious public liked to get its cues from France, the German companies sent designers to Paris to discover what women were wearing in fashion shows, on the streets, at the races, and in the theatre. Upon their return, expensive haute couture creations were transformed into affordable, mass-produced off-the-rack garments of French flair that were not simply sold locally but exported to many countries, including France. By the mid-1920s, after decades of steady expansion, the act of Konfektion businesses in Berlin, most of them Jewish-owned, reached nearly 800. The Berlin fashion industry employed then a 3rd of the citys work force, sold merchandize in big department stores throughout the country, and exported its goods all over Europe and the Unites States.
Berliner Chic by Ingram and Sark is organised in an irregular way, measured by strictly academic criteria, since the authors move boldly across disciplinary boundaries and conventional periodization. Some parts illuminate in a full sail and quite extensively historical developments. The 1st 4 chapters, for example, tie fashion to the elaborate traditions of collecting and exhibiting, to photography and film, and to historiographic discourses. The final three chapters zoom in on contemporary Berlin that had emerged since the eighties as a sum of alternative pop-culture. Particularly interesting is the chapter Berlin Calling that immerses the referee in the creation of spunk and techno.
It is just this cross and eclectic (in the best feel of the word) methodology that does justice to the idiosyncratic subject matterthe entwinement of the citys identity with its fashion practices, in both historic and contemporary perspective. And this is what makes the word enjoyable to the scholar-expert as good as the amateur reader. To the other audience Berliner Chic offers a wealth of theoretical references, a historical framework, and a rich bibliography (albeit no index), and for the latter audience there are enough of charming anecdotes, engaging stories, and ample photographs. One can guess the reader actually packing this word before a travel to Berlin and using it quite easily as an alternative travel lead to the citys high and low cultures, presents and pasts, museums and shops, center and peripheries.
No comments:
Post a Comment