Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 (review)

Mila Ganeva's extensive study of fashion surveys the surfaces of Weimar culture and looks behind the scenes of an industry that burgeoned with the growth of mass production and mass culture during the 1920s. As an expression of a way of life, an art, and an industry, fashion, as Ganeva compellingly demonstrates, was "central to women's experience of modernity." The book is divided into two parts: "Discourses on Fashion" and "Displays of Fashion." In the first part, Ganeva reflects on the fashion industry, display windows, fashion journalism, and fashion's consumers and creators. She brings to life the social actors long forgotten who were instrumental in fashioning modernity. Fashion journalists like Ola Alsen, Elsa Herzog, Helen Grund (who moved to Paris), and other female fashion writers became a new type of flâneur. Their gazes recorded and reported on latest trends and featured the women who wore them. Ganeva discusses the impact of the trendy publishing house with magazines such as Die Dame and Der Uhu. In addition to offering a "rich discursive landscape of Weimar fashion," according to Ganeva, they reveal "women's increasing self-consciousness and self-descriptiveness in matters of fashion" (53). These magazines, which hired female journalists, coached women on how to be modern, highlighting individuality and professional engagement. They served as symbolic "mirrors," in which the modern woman gazed and invented herself, while they contributed to transforming the public sphere and with it images of femininity. Ullstein was known to promote women by featuring female intellectuals and artists, at least during the early 1920s, until the publisher hired Kurt Korff to take over all of the areas in which women had been very active. The result, according to Ganeva, is a much less differentiated rendition of female models after his hire in 1926. This observation is just one example of Ganeva's thorough research and nuanced analysis of her subject matter.

In the second part of her study, Ganeva's multifaceted analysis takes into account films, mannequins, and literature as vehicles and commentators of fashion. She brings to the fore the under-theorized genre of Konfektionskomödie ("fashion farce") with its lavish fashion shows and narratives that promoted the transformative power of clothes. Her analysis of Ernst Lubitsch's Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916) and Der Blusenkönig (1917), as well as mention of early newsreels of fashion shows as forerunners to a large body of feature films, highlights a heightened awareness of fashion's role in scripting modernity. The fashion film Der Fürst von Pappenheim (1927), for instance, also served to advertise Berlin designer houses and clothing stores. Thus Ganeva reflects on the intricate relationship between commerce and entertainment and the beginnings of product placement. Accordingly, she highlights the film star as a vehicle of fashion and focuses especially on Brigitte Helm's dual role as actress and mannequin. Her appearance in fashion magazines attests to the fluid relationship between film and fashion.

Another key player in the fashion industry that rarely receives critical attention in studies of gender and the Weimar Republic is the mannequin. Ganeva fills in this gap and offers a lively history of mannequins that includes a glimpse into the lives of women who chose this job and who became a staple of the industry as spectacle in display windows, department stores and salons during the 1920s. In her keen analysis of Irmgard Keun's Gilgi—eine von uns, Ganeva makes the reader aware of how fashion is used in fiction as a signifier of class and generation. In the novel, fashion stands for female self-expression and creativity, but as Ganeva astutely suggests, "Gilgi's variegated and nuanced experience of [fashion] draws a complex picture of woman's—real and imagined—modernity" (175).

Ganeva's cultural-studies approach maps out an intricate social, political, and cultural landscape whose hemlines, pleats, cuffs and décolletages speak to the complex expressions of gender, class, and ethnicity...