Epilogue

Summary

It is of course more joyful and more pleasant to stroll through the streets of the rich quarters and observe the colorful crowds of women. The much criticized women's fashion is almost the only creation [in the city] that is lively and dynamic today. Pedants sin against life when they consider fashion a folly because it is transient and hence meaningless. But fashion is a symbol for life itself, for in its continuous passing and change life lavishly pours out its gifts, without calculating in fear whether the expenditure is appropriate to the achievement…. It is this wastefulness, this eternal beginning, and this colorful richness that make fashion so enjoyable.

— August Endell, Die Schönheit der großen Stadt

WHEN ARCHITECT AUGUST ENDELL wrote this observation in 1908, a few years after moving to Berlin, he seems to have anticipated and welcomed the rapidly expanding presence of fashion and fashion spectacles in public life in the bustling metropolis. Within the next two decades fashion became transformed into a mass experience in which not only the select few but also middle-class and working-class women participated as both consumers and producers, observers and the observed, commentators and readers. As many women started working outside their homes for the first time, they were earning money and buying off-the-rack clothes or purchasing patterns to create their own outfits. While they had more opportunity to present themselves stylishly dressed in public, they had also to deal with the new pressures created as increasingly they were expected to dress more fashionably and appear more youthful.

For their part, the growing mass media endorsed the democratizing of fashion. Dozens of fashion magazines and the movies gave the women of Weimar Germany plenty of practical advice, provided images to emulate, and shaped taste. And discussing fashion in the popular press became fashionable in itself. As fashion journalist Ea von Allesch reported as early as 1920, “never before has there been so much excitement regarding fashion as in the last few years.” She went on to conclude: “Of course, fashion has always been extremely important to women and to the professions that are invested in it.