Berlinische Galerie Presents Fashion and Art as Mirrors of Change in Individuals and Social Life

The city museum, Berlinische Galerie, welcomes the public from today until May 30, 2022, with “Images in Fashion – Clothing in Art. Photography, Fine Arts, and Fashion since 1900”, exploring the relationship between fashion, artistic movements, and society, spanning the twentieth-century representations in photographs, paintings, drawings, clothing designs, and contemporary art.

“What role has fashion played in the painting, drawing, and photography of the past century? With what rules were clothing and costumes employed in fine art? How did artists dress and present themselves then and now? How is fashion used as a medium in contemporary art?” – with these questions as a starting point, the narrative of the exhibition unfolds more or less chronologically on thematic sections, highlighting a diversity of artists such as Anna Muthesius, Helmut Newton, Lotte Laserstein, Christian Schad, Sibylle Bergemann, August Sander, Alexandra Hopf or the queer photographer Rolf von Bergmann. The selected works and garments are like windows into particular points in time, interlacing the fashion reform movement around 1900 with Dadaist ideas of the 1920s and avant-garde creations in present-day art.

Around 270 exhibits reveal the powerful communicative aspect and semiotic value of dress since fashion is not just the creation of designers, but an image full of references that echoes the context of an era. It mirrors different aspects by the way of illustration aesthetic image, politics, beauty standards, and the social changes in connection to technological innovations. The transformation of cultural values is often reflected throughout the history of art and fashion.

For instance, Anna Muthesius was an advocate of Anti-fashion and protagonist of the reform movement in Germany. She rejected the physically oppressive corset in women’s clothing. She created her own designs that were based on her philosophy, on which she published a book in 1903, Das Eigenkleid der Frau (Women’s Own Dress) encouraging women not to follow what fashion dictates and to decide for themselves what to wear.

Varying responses to reform styles were published in design periodicals, followed by a rapidly growing magazine market, in the 1920s fashion illustration became an important means of expression and income for women artists, like Jeanne Mammen, for example.  Her illustrations and drawings captured the metropolis of Berlin in the golden 20s, depicting society scenes of what the modern women meant at that time.

Another highlight of the exhibition is Lotte Laserstein, remarkable for her oeuvre from the final years of the Weimar Republic, in particular the “New Woman” pictorial portraits from a female perspective.

Laserstein’s carefully composed paintings remain realistic, highlighting the emancipated woman with sensuous clothing and corporeality. A greater part of her artistic production comprises portraits of women while she rarely painted male models. Laserstein is ranked among the greatest female artists of the 20th century although her works have been neglected post-war and only since the 1990s she has received belated recognition.

Changing styles in fashion reflect shifts in society and so in the era of modernism when artists’ clothing was not limited anymore just to painters’ smocks. In 1929, one of the key figures in Berlin Dada, Raoul Hausmann posed in front of August Sander’s camera in his self-designed “Oxford trousers”. In parallel, inspired by the “Oxford bags”, contemporary artist Alexandra Hopf interpreted the garment as a textile object for this exhibition. This study resulted in an installation that combines movement, light, and sound.

When we talk about artistic expressions, the LGBT movement was a driving force in West Berlin in the late 1970s and 1980s, when creative people were trying out alternative ways of life. For queer artists, clothing was a tool of self-empowerment, while their works explored gender identity which was inevitably reflected in fashion. The photographer Rolf von Bergmann became an important chronicler of the Berlin scene and entrusted Berlinische Galerie with numerous design items from his own performances, which are now being shown in the museum for the first time.

Among prominent positions in art history, contemporary artists namely Wiebke Siem, Ursula Sax, and Alexandra Hopf, display clothing as sculptural or performative installations interlacing historical sources such as the geometric Constructivist uniform clothing designed after the Russian Revolution avant-garde artists like Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Alexander Rodchenko.