About Strong Women, Home-Made Clothes and Fashion Punks: how fashion in the GDR could create freedom
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In the GDR clothes were not fashion, they came into the category of “supplying consumer goods”. Nevertheless a counter-culture grew up around the socialist uniform look – especially with the fashion magazine Sibylle and fashion theatre by ccd and allerleirauh
Shower curtains, strawberry foil or nappies were the materials used by Sabine von Oettingen to create clothes in the eighties. “I sewed everything that could be sewn”, she remembers. Today these clothes are being carefully preserved in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, as part of GDR history. Or rather as one of the splinters of GDR history that refused to fit into the official doctrine. Back then, Sabine von Oettingen belonged to a clique of young people aged between 17 and 19 who lived in East Berlin and wanted more from life than to fit into the socialist biographies intended for them. “We were fashion punks”, remembers the costume and stage designer. Clothing became an expression of this desire for an individual lifestyle. “Nobody wanted to wear the things you could buy, it just wasn’t on.” Chic, charmant & dauerhaft
So they sewed. Yet the garments designed by Sabine von Oettingen and her friends Katharina Reinwald and Frieda Bergemann von Wild went far beyond everyday clothing. They were crazy costumes that belonged on stage. The ccd group came into being – chic, charmant & dauerhaft (chic, charming and lasting), an ironic reference to the criteria of GDR fashion production. Their first official public appearance was in 1983 in the Berlin youth club Schaufenster, at an exhibition by photographer Jürgen Hohmuth.
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Fashion in the GDR was primarily a story of shortages: of fabric, trends, ideas – in fact of everything that defines enthusiasm for clothes. The fact that people still have positive memories of this is mainly thanks to the fashion and culture magazine Sibylle. The magazine was founded in 1956, in the same year that a young woman embarked on her degree in fashion design at the University of the Arts in Berlin-Weißensee. New, natural style
Her name was Dorothea Melis and in 1961 she analysed Sibylle in her thesis: she claimed that the magazine was orientated to the fashion style of the pre-war period, it only recognised the elegant lady or the unsophisticated housewife. The reaction to the harsh criticism was surprising, the chief editor took her on as fashion editor.
Dorothea Melis, born in 1938, is still a woman charged with energy these days. You can imagine that she managed to turn Sibylle around in her mid-20s: she brought reality into the magazine. |
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Even at her first fashion production in the Pergamonmuseum she told photographer Günter Rössler how fantastic she thought the West German youth magazine twen looked. And then an image was created in which the model did not assume an artificial pose next to a statue but just sat in a relaxed way on the steps. The new, natural style of the Sibylle fashion photos was born.
No glamour, no eccentricity, no West
Although Dorothea Melis thought twen was good, her attitude to fashion was considerably different to that of her colleagues in the West. “We didn’t see quick changes in fashion, we saw the cultural aspect, the way of dressing oneself, putting oneself across and behaving.” Most of what was on show in Sibylle was classic, sensible, wearable. It was only the accessories that were crazy.
The women of the GDR were able to identify with the realistic dreams presented in Sibylle. The circulation of Sibylle was 200 000 copies, which sold out at lightning speed, because the number of readers was nearly a million. Two things above all attracted women readers to Sibylle. The elaborate sewing patterns, because making their own clothes was very popular with the women of the GDR. “The shortage aroused an immense creativity”, remembers Dorothea Melis. “Beautiful, clever, sensual, self-confident, strong”
The second fascination with Sibylle was the photos. The garments shown were not usually available to buy. Yet the models embodied reality. In order to give her fashion approach a modern face, Dorothea Melis threw out the old-school style photographers and drafted in students or professional women whom they approached in the street or in cafes as mannequins. A modern, strong type of woman, photographed in natural poses, only a little more beautiful – and better dressed – than most of the female GDR citizens.
“The models were never allowed to laugh when I was working with them, because I thought that if they did it brought them too close to the official GDR image of our happy women” says Ute Mahler. She and Sibylle Bergemann are the two photographers who probably influenced the style of Sibylle most enduringly. Bergemann brought her colleague onto the magazine. Ute Mahler photographed her first edition in 1978. “We tried to show an image of women that corresponded with our ideal”, she says. “Beautiful, clever, sensual, self-confident, strong.” Author photos that stuck in the mind
The Sibylle editorial team allowed photographers a free rein. The result was author photos that stuck in the mind. “We always did things we could advocate ourselves, things that were believable”, says Ute Mahler, who is now a Professor of Photography in Hamburg, and founded the Ostkreuz agency in 1990, with Sibylle Bergemann as one of the co-founders. “We hardly showed the achievements of socialism in the background”. They showed grey street canyons, pre-fab buildings, landscapes.
Ute Mahler and all other well-known Sibylle photographers – Arno Fischer, Roger Melis, Werner Mahler – came from the field of portrait or reporting photography. And you can tell that from their productions. “It’s precisely this aspect of fashion that interested us: the fact that you can recreate reality, the fact that you can tell a story about reality, packaged in fashion photos.” And this reality had a continued effect. Just this past year Ute Mahler was approached by a woman, who said “I have to tell you how fantastic I found your photos in Sibylle. I even called my daughter Julia after the model who was standing in the lake with her head cocked. Fashion counter-culture
Was there any censorship? Not one that was stated, says Ute Mahler. But it was clear that some things were not permissible. The fact that the models were not laughing for instance was borderline. And when Sibylle Bergemann once showed two women on the beach with the corners of their mouths turned down, the smiles were edited into the picture retrospectively. All photos were checked by the Women’s Commission of the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; Socialist Unity Party of Germany), which was quick to find short skirts, drab colours, serious facial expressions or back views “unworthy”. Maxi fashion was not allowed to be promoted in Sibylle either because of its excessive use of fabric.
There is a direct route leading to the fashion sub-culture of the eighties from the Sibylle photos. “They were our children, so to speak”, says Dorothea Melis. What formed in those days as a fashion counter-culture was not so much a revolution, it was more of a movement that simply ignored the state. However the state did not ignore it. The State Security watched all fringe groups that were visually conspicuous. “Our group was being watched by the Stasi too”, remembers Sabine von Oettingen. And anything that the state could not prevent was included. “We got more and more official appearances with ccd, 20 or 30 shows.” Fashion performance
You can describe these appearances as fashion theatre or fashion performance. At the end the audience climbed onto the catwalk and danced with the actors. Shows by ccd had a liberating effect. Then a new group developed from this in the form of allerleihrauh. allerleirauh was the next logical step after ccd. Everything we had worked out with ccd had to become more and more extreme”, says Sabine von Oettingen. ccd had already made clothes for famous GDR bands. With allerleirauh it was Pankow that made the music. Angelika Kroker sewed scaly coats out of leather and “hedgehog caps” out of which copper nails were protruding like spines. They were real stage costumes. In 1988 the group allerleirauh had their first appearance. An overwhelming success. There was even a second show as well, but it was after the Wende (end of the GDR), in December 1989. ccd and allerleirauh had expressed a new, free attitude to life. But with the fall of the Wall came liberation on a grand scale all of a sudden. And what had seemed like a daring outburst in the GDR system, which was repressive in fashion issues as well, became normality overnight on 9th November 1989. |
Stefanie Dörre
is an editor for the Berlin city magazine “tip”.
Translation: Jo Beckett
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion
November 2009
Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
is an editor for the Berlin city magazine “tip”.
Translation: Jo Beckett
Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion
November 2009
Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
