During the 1920s and 1930s, fashion was written about extensively by German intellectuals who used fashion as a metaphor for the fleeting nature of capitalism and the mindless consumption of the masses. Fashion, and mass consumption in general, represented the increasing difficulty of asserting one’s independence from the crowd. Modern, urban life with its fast pace and anonymous crowds threatened the independence and coherence of the individual subject. For Walter Benjamin, for example, continually changing styles of dress were an example of capitalism’s fetishization of the commodity. Fleeting and transitory, fashion expressed the beauty of the ephemeral and was therefore quintessentially “modern.” Significantly, Benjamin’s fashionable masses were gendered female. Women – and particularly fashionable women – represented the conformity and mindless consumerism that seemed to threaten the independence of the modern urban (male) subject.
My dissertation – Fashioning the Modern German Woman: Female Journalists and Discourses of the Self in Interwar Germany – examines competing images of the fashionable woman in Berlin during the interwar period and endeavors to understand why and to what effect such images were created and circulated. To male social critics in Weimar Germany, the fashionable woman was the epitome of the mindless consumer. My dissertation adds the perspective of women writers to this male discourse. Many female journalists, by contrast, portrayed the fashionable woman as an empowered individual, capable of using ever-changing modes of dress to develop and give public expression to an individual self. Other female journalists portrayed her as embodying the class privilege of bourgeois womanhood; this fashionable woman dressed in such a way as to distinguish herself from the classless uniformity of the mass market.
My dissertation contributes to the literature on modernity, gender and the visual culture of the Weimar Republic. Much of the work to-date on the “New Woman” in Weimar Germany has focused on the image of the sexually transgressive, empowered flapper as a myth constructed as an expression of anxiety over mass culture, permeable class boundaries and women’s increasing presence in the public sphere. My dissertation adds women’s voices to this discussion. How did women understand the changes going on around them and how did they, themselves, construct the modern German woman? Using a variety of sources – including magazine articles, fashion photography, unpublished booklets, letters and speeches – my dissertation compares the varied images of the fashionable woman as a means of exploring how Germans renegotiated the boundaries between masculine and feminine, and public and private. I suggest that during a period of tremendous change, the contest over the definition of the fashionable woman reflected, on the one hand, the blooming of a new consciousness of self among women, and on the other hand, an effort to reconcile that new awareness of self with long-standing identities as members of economic, national and political communities.