Transcript​​

Ach, Deutschland. Every day is Oktoberfest. Lederhosen and dirndls everywhere you go. Wait. If you think that's what Germans wear, think again!

 

Welcome to What They Can Teach Us: The Podcast. My name is Frank Brueckner and I created this series to provide additional context to the website “What They Can Teach Us,” which was developed from interviews with four women who immigrated from Germany to Canada in the early 1950s.

 

The website and podcasts were initiated and are supported by the Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg. In these podcasts you will learn what life was like in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Barbara, Lisa, Alma and Anneliese, like so many of our parents and grandparents, left Germany and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to begin their lives anew in Canada.

 

This is part 4: What They Were Wearing.

 

Of course, dirndls and lederhosen exist and are still worn on special occasions in certain regions of Germany, but they are only one of many traditional folk costumes, or Trachten, in the country, and you would have a hard time finding them outside the alpine regions of Bavaria, Austria or South Tyrol in northern Italy.

 

Germany is a modern global culture, and today when you see people wearing traditional costumes in Germany, they could be women in hijabs, men in turbans or yarmulke, or women in saris or traditional African fabrics, or in dirndls.

 

Based on the regions our four interviewees Anneliese, Barbara, Alma and Lisa came from, it is highly unlikely that any of them were wearing dirndls or other kind of traditional garb when they arrived in Canada in the early 1950s.

 

Germany was a modern European country, both before and after World War II, and most likely the four women wore modern clothes of their time, as depicted in Alexander Freund's book “Aufbrüche nach dem Zusammenbruch,” which translates to “Departures after the Collapse,” and documents German immigration to North America after World War II.

 

A few young women and a young man stick out for wearing fashionable 1950s trousers, haircuts, boldly striped t-shirts and even aviator sunglasses.

 

Humans have been wearing clothing since our species began to develop. Not having protective fur like other animals, we needed to find other ways to cover our bodies against rain, cold and sun. During our existence, humans had to endure at least two ice ages, each one lasting hundreds of thousands of years. They survived these times by migrating to habitable regions and by creating clothing that protected them from the elements.

 

Studies of the evolution of body lice show that humans have been wearing clothes for more than 170,000 years. These parasites live on human blood and need the heat of our body to survive and thrive. Clothing is ideal to keep human body temperature constant.

 

The first pieces of garment were most likely fur, leather, grass or other plant materials draped, wrapped or tied around the body. Shoes were made from leather, often stuffed with grass for insulation.

 

As soon as the sewing needle was invented, about 50,000 years ago, humans were able to sew those loose pieces of clothing together and provide for tighter fitting clothes and better heat insulation. And happier lice.

 

Linen is one of the oldest textiles in the world, dating back at least 36,000 years. As soon as the processing technique of weaving was invented, about 32,000 years ago, the fibers of the flax plant could be woven into fabric.

 

Spinning, weaving and dyeing cotton dates back at least 6,000 years, as archaeological evidence from the Americas and Asia prove.

 

Wool was not used before the breeding of sheep with woolly fleece, about 5,000 years ago, roughly five millennia after the domestication of sheep. The production of silk began around the same time in Neolithic China.

 

Although they are by no means scientific documents, both the Bible and the Quran mention Adam and Eve, or Hawa, hiding their shame by sewing fig leaves together to cover their private parts. Later in the Old Testament, Rebekah puts goat skin around her son Jacob's hands, which might be the first description of mittens. These descriptions in the Old Testament date back to around 900 BCE.

 

The earliest mention of clothing in Hinduism is the Rig Veda, a book of hymns from around 3000 BCE, and mentions spinning cotton to create a sari or a strip of cloth.

 

These examples may seem old, but they are young compared to one of the earliest depictions in art of a human wearing threaded clothes, the Venus of Lespugue, a statuette carved from tusk ivory, found in France, and at least 25,000 years old.

 

But compared with the more than 300,000 years of Homo sapiens walking on planet Earth, all of that was recent history.

 

Yet humans wanted more than just protective, functional clothes. They experimented with fabrics, added patterns, began to decorate their clothing. They playfully applied shells and wooden beads, or carved bones to their garments and shoes.

 

They had fun combining different materials. They wanted to stand out, display their personality, surround themselves with beauty, and thus invented fashion without even thinking about it.

 

Early on, fabrics were traded over long distances on every continent. However, certain materials, fabrics and garments, were reserved for the privileged. Linen and silk were luxury items only the rich could afford.

 

Clergy and nobility excluded the lower classes from owning or wearing such clothes. The purple stripe on Roman togas, extracted from sea snails, was extremely expensive and exclusive to senators and later dignitaries of the Catholic Church.

 

As soon as societal strata developed, different castes and classes wore different clothes, or were forced to wear them, respectively. This differentiation did not stop with layers of society. Many professions had special and often uniformed garments. This often had to do with practicality or safety. For example, thick leather aprons for blacksmiths, protecting the worker from the heat and sharp objects.

 

Out of those professional garments developed folk costumes, or Trachten, especially in rural areas, showing the wearer's occupation, religious affiliation, or ethnicity. For millennia, fashion styles tended to last for decades or even centuries, often influenced by the dominant powers of the era. Prominent examples were the Romans, or more than a thousand years later, the Spanish.

 

The more enlightened and progressive human societies became, the less there was a need for clothing codes and restrictions. The French Revolution caused, without doubt, some of the most profound early breaks with traditions: away with wigs and breeches, and repressions by the church and aristocracy.

 

The advent of the 20th century came with new artificial materials, often made from fossil fuels. New synthetic fibers allowed for faster and cheaper production of clothes. In the late 1920s, when Lisa, Alma, Barbara, and Anneliese were little girls, nylons started to compete successfully with silk. Plastic buttons replaced wood, mother of pearl, and other materials.

 

And maybe most revolutionary: women began to wear trousers, something that was unheard of and even scandalous up until the early 1970s. It all began with women working in arms factories during World War I. Wearing skirts and aprons would have been impractical and even dangerous, so they wore coveralls that their male colleagues had been wearing. But the real breakthrough for women's pants were yachting pants, and the androgynous garçon style, both designed by Coco Chanel in the 1920s.

 

Of course, the House of Chanel produces couture, custom-made, one-of-a-kind garments that are handcrafted for individual clients. Ready-to-wear, mass-produced clothing sold in standard sizes emerged in Europe in the mid-19th century due to the capabilities of the Industrial Revolution, which made clothing more accessible to the working class. Couture pieces are expensive due to their bespoke nature and high level of craftsmanship, whereas ready-to-wear is more affordable.

 

Hauvogteiplatz in the center of Berlin had become the center of German ready-to-wear fashion from the 1830s until the Nazi takeover. Jewish manufacturers, designers, and merchants exported mass-produced fashion to other European countries and even the United States.

In 1927, more than 800 companies produced clothing in Berlin. This success story ended in 1933 with the forced sale and Aryanization of Jewish-owned companies. In other words, the de facto stealing and takeover of German-Jewish property by non-Jewish Germans.

 

1930s fascist movements around the world, from America to the United Kingdom, but most prominently in Germany, Italy, and Spain, inspired a new fashion style. Uniforms and the reinstallment of traditional patriarchal roles and garbs: dresses and skirts for women, pants and jackets for men. Then Germany started World War II.

 

When it was over, our four interviewees were teenagers, or in their early 20s, respectively, and millions of people were dead and not a lot of things were left intact. But necessities were at the forefront. That means, similar to 300,000 years ago, people needed clothes to survive the harsh post-war winters.

 

German women clearing bomb damage in cities known as Trümmerfrauen, or “rubble women,” wore heavily patched or modified clothing, including trousers from deceased soldiers, in order to do their work.

 

In August 1946, the first care packages arrived in Germany.

 

While those first packages contained redistributed rations of tinned food, originally meant for U.S. Army soldiers, soon came wool packages with skeins of wool to knit sweaters, socks, and mittens, blanket packages with two army blankets, sewing kits, and shoe soles, and cotton packages with 11 meters of cotton fabric. This ultimately led to, as Munich newspaper “Heute” wrote in 1947, the comeback of fashion, and they provided suggestions of how to turn those blankets into fashionable skirts and coats.

 

As the war ended, the fashion industry began to recover, and one of the first post-war fashion magazines in Germany, Berlin's “Modenblatt,” was launched, promoting creativity and hope through fashion.

 

As a matter of fact, every available scrap of fabric was used for clothing. Naturally, there was a surplus of army coats and uniforms, which were cut up, cleaned, and dyed. Curtains, drapes, tablecloths, bedsheets, down blankets were transformed into shirts, blouses, suits, and used for warm, protective, and, yes, fashionable jackets, pants, dresses, coats, and more. There were even wedding dresses sewn from parachutes made of nylon or silk.

 

And then, in February 1947, two and a half years after the liberation of Paris from German occupation, fashion designer Christian Dior presented his new look at his studios in Paris.

 

To quote Vogue magazine, “the New Look marked a turning point in fashion history and set the course for post-war fashion, although it was less novel than nostalgic.”[i]

 

The silhouette changed from straight lines and boxy shoulders to, “curving feminine bosoms linked up with curving feminine hips by slender molded waist”,[ii] as one reporter wrote.

 

This internationally popular new fashion also influenced German fashion, featuring softer shoulders, cinched waists, and full, voluminous skirts, often worn with petticoats. The term New Look was likely coined by Carmel Snow, who was at the time writing for “Harper's Bazaar.” Dior himself had named his collection la ligne corolle, referring to an inverted flower.

 

And like flowers, clothes were colorful.

 

However, not everyone was enamored of the New Look. Some people voiced concerns about the obscene amount of fabric, from 25 to 40 meters, used to create Dior's New Look fashions.

 

Although the four women liked clothes, and may even have dressed in the style of the new look, their skirts and jackets, blouses and dresses were probably still sewn from durable fabric repurposed from curtains, old army coats, blankets, or parachutes. Couture dresses were certainly not in the suitcases that Alma, Barbara, Anneliese, or Lisa carried when they emigrated to Canada in the early 1950s.

 

“And I had two big suitcases, it wasn’t suitcases, what do you call those, like wicker baskets, those real old-fashioned things, and they were heavy. Because I almost had the limit of what I could take of personal things.”[iii]

 

Sometimes new immigrants had to face unexpected fashion choices, as Barbara pointed out in her interview with Alexander Freund in 1993.

 

“My first day on the job was the second of January and my first job was to clean out two fireplaces, with the ashes and all those things. I was given a uniform to wear. Little black thing and little white thing and thank God they didn’t have to have a crown for me [laughs]. I don’t think I did. Anyway, that was a shock for me, because that was something I had to get used to.

 

[Alexander] What exactly?

 

To the uniform, to wearing a housemaid's uniform.

 

[Alexander] Why was it a shock?

 

A-- yes. Because I didn’t like the uniform. It was not very flattering to me. And it was also a black dress that was very elderly and washed out and faded and I just didn’t like myself in that outfit. And I didn’t see why I should wear something like that. But anyway, that was a shock to me. Well, a surprise, an unpleasant surprise, not a shock maybe, shock is too stark a word. But that was number one. And of course, I accepted that and everything is fine. Only that was a surprise.”[iv]

 

And while post-war Canada was flooded with cheaply made, imported clothing from Asia and the U.S., some Canadian designers sought to create a unique, recognizable identity for Canadian-made clothing, founding the Association of Canadian Couturiers in 1954.

 

That year, the Association produced the first all-Canadian fashion show in New York, and from there on in, they presented fashion shows in major Canadian cities twice a year, with the assistance of government and textile manufacturers.

 

Through the last decades of the 20th century and into the 21st, Canada's entire fashion industry has become increasingly designer focused. Today, the majority of Canadian apparel companies are owned by Canadians. 75 percent of the workforce are women, and an estimated 50 percent are newly arrived immigrants.

 

“Here they dress more sloppy than when they go to Germany, where everything is so perfectly dressed. But at that time, it was-- And the quality thing—clothes, they were cheap and you threw them out after a while, while in Germany you bought things which were solid and clothes last for years and years and years. All these little things, it was discussed among us or have to get used to it, to different values in life. You know, things you bought. It wasn’t necessarily that you buy the best and solid and you pay for it right away. When I think of it, that took a lot of adjusting.”[v]

 

This was part 4 of a series of podcasts accompanying the interviews of “What They Can Teach Us”: What They Were Wearing, researched, written, produced, and read by me, Frank Brückner.

 

This ongoing series will add new podcasts in irregular intervals, so stay tuned for What They Can Teach Us: The Podcast and check back regularly for new episodes.

 

[i] Everything You Need to Know About Christian Dior’s New Look Silhouette | Vogue

[ii] ibid

[iii] Anneliese Lomer, Session 1, Oral History interview by Alexander Freund (Surrey, B.C., Canada; November 30, 1993), Identity in Immigration Collection, Alexander Freund Fond, German-Canadian Oral History Archive, University of Winnipeg Oral History Archive.

[iv] Barbara Baanders, Oral History interview by Alexander Freund (Richmond, B.C., Canada; September 22, 1993), Identity in Immigration Collection, Alexander Freund Fond, German-Canadian Oral History Archive, University of Winnipeg Oral History Archive.

[v] Lomer, 1993.

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