Report: Cosmopolitan “German Fashion” at the Cologne Men’s Fashion Week | DHS Conference Bursary recipient

Reports

5 February, 2025 -

Peter J. Sproule, PhD candidate and SSHRC doctoral fellow in the Department of Art History at Queen’s University, reports on their research into "German Fashion" which was presented at the 2024 DHS Annual Conference Border Control: Excursion, Incursion and Exclusion supported by the DHS Student/Precariously Employed Speaker Bursary.

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After the Fascist violence of the Second World War, post-war West Germans were compelled to reconsider what it meant to make, wear, and sell “German Fashion.” As part of the wide-ranging pursuit to redefine “Germanness,” West Germany inaugurated a new industry trade fair in August 1954, the Internationalen Herren-Mode-Woche Köln, or the Cologne International Men’s Fashion Week. This event allowed the West German and European menswear industries to come together, both to demonstrate their newest wares as well as to form business relationships with domestic and international menswear companies.

In my presentation at the Design History Society’s 2024 Annual Conference, I argued that the surprising success of Cologne Men’s Fashion Week was the result of its innovative redefinition of “German Fashion.” Rather than continuing historic nationalistic attempts to isolate a uniquely “German” manner of dress, Cologne embraced cosmopolitan pan-Europeanism and became a prominent site for transnational design exchange.

The revolutionary anti-fascist ideal of internationalism was not only represented by the Cologne’s enactment of fashion diplomacy and economic partnerships; it also extended to media representations envisioning the ideal German man as a cosmopolitan attendee of this international event. This is showcased, for example, in Hans Fischach’s illustrated cover for the September 1954 issue of menswear magazine Der Herr, which shows a man visiting the trade fair, who has just checked into his hotel. Fischach demonstrates the man’s cosmopolitan judgement through his clothing, which combines elements speaking to the fashion preferences of the three countries occupying West Germany. The overall silhouette of this man’s suit expresses the influence of traditional British tailoring. However, he opts for more casually styled details and colours that speak to an American influence while also choosing to wear a waistcoat underneath, which was then considered a French style. Thus, rather than selecting the most visibly “German” clothing, he experiments with combining suitable sartorial forms from among pan-European fashions to demonstrate his refined “German” judgment.

In the mid-twentieth century, West Germany built a quiet dominance over fashion diplomacy in Continental Europe due to Cologne’s monopoly on the season opening fair and its foregrounding of international values. Cologne would officially deem itself the “City of Menswear” due to the prominence of its fashion week. However, Cologne’s leading role would ultimately be short-lived. As the fashion industry evolved, the importance of such trade fairs declined, lending authority instead to global companies, individual designers, and a radically altered men’s magazine culture.

While Cologne Men’s Fashion Week would decline in importance, the event’s innovative suggestion of a cosmopolitan ideal for “German Fashion” endures. I contend that Cologne’s cosmopolitanism is the ancestor to the contemporary location-specific multiculturalism of “Berlin Fashion.” Rather than limiting the country’s aesthetic to a singular form, Berlin-based fashion designers and image makers continue to represent “Germanness” as a cross-cultural assemblage, uniquely emerging from the cosmopolitan experimentalism at home in contemporary Germany.

With the support of the conference bursary, I travelled from Canada to Canterbury to present my research and benefit from hearing presentations from many others, all of which informed my thinking about the international intersections of my project on German fashion and its position within the wider discipline of design history.

Fashion topics were a notable subtheme of this year’s DHS conference. Grace Lees-Maffei set the tone with a conceptual consideration of gloves as surrogate hands that blur the border between body and world, and the panel with Elizabeth Kramer, Alison Matthews David, and Ellen Sampson addressed the corporeal stains and strains of using, living with, and soiling everyday fabrics. I was fortunate to present my project on a panel confronting the political negotiations inherent to clothing, alongside Nkumbu Mutambo, who spoke about the political complexities of the Zambian ‘Kaunda Suit’ within pan-Africanist and nationalist movements. Our panel chair, Elli Michaela Young, led us in a lively discussion about the role of masculine uniforms in constructing national identities.

Several presenters also highlighted design in the German-speaking world. In their joint panel, Petra Eisele, Angeli Sachs, and Esther Cleven argued for expanding the disciplinary borders of German design histories, challenging conventional masculine and industrial design historiographies. I was especially pleased by their remarks on Werkbund designer Lilly Reich, who also played an instrumental role in early-twentieth-century “German Fashion” discourse. And, while concurrent scheduling meant that I missed Jeremy Aynsley’s salient presentation on the polarization of post-war West and East German design prior to the building of the Berlin Wall, the Gala dinner provided an opportunity to speak with him at length.

The DHS bursary allowed me to benefit from such fruitful transnational dialogues and transdisciplinary exchanges. As a discipline perhaps uniquely oriented towards the blurring of conventional academic borders, the conference theme of “Border Control” elegantly attended to the amorphous composition of design history.

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Peter J. Sproule is a PhD candidate and SSHRC doctoral fellow in the Department of Art History at Queen’s University. Research in Europe for his dissertation on representations of idealized masculinity in West German fashion illustration has been supported with grants from DAAD and Fulbright in addition to a David Edney Research Travel Award.