I recently discovered L’Affichiste gallery, a true Montréal treasure, a beautiful gallery space, run by a wonderful, inspiring, and very knowledgeable woman, who is a poster expert and writer. Karen specializes in original, non-reproduction vintage posters from 1880 to present, and her passion for her work makes you want to start collecting vintage posters and to study their history.

If you are looking for new decoration ideas for your walls, or would like to add to your collection of cool art, this is the place for you! You can browse their online collection, but I really recommend to stop by the gallery and see the beautiful space and the collections.

Karen started the gallery five years ago and has clients all over the world. The collections range from international vintage advertising posters, to classic film posters, to original Montréal Jazz Fest posters.

You can read up and follow some stories about particular posters on her blog.

This is one of my favourites: “German Colonial Possessions surrendered to the Allies since August 1914″

Bijoux is the latest performance piece conceptualized by Marie-Gabrielle Ménard, founder of MANDALA SITÙ, a “laboratory-incubator-greenhouse for feminine dance studies,” featuring five female dancers in solos choreographed by five local male choreographers.

“I wanted to see whether the men’s vision of women would be gentler than women’s,”  Ménard said after a rehearsal. “Before the men started work, I expected them to show women competing with each other. But the men didn’t – not at all. [...] Even though the five choreographers worked independently of each other, the thread of female harmony weaves throughout the entire work. Only after all the solos were competed sis the choreographers see each other’s work.”

“It seems that men see other qualities in women than their competitiveness among each other, “ Ménard continued. “You know, we don’t often talk about women’s solidarity. You see this spirit in the show’s last solo by David Rancourt. Each woman has her own space, but in harmony with the others.”

Accompanied by live music by Gaële, the five solos represent five different stories, with different movements, different music, and different sound and light effects.

The first solo (performed by Milan Gervais) opens with repetitive arm gestures and returning to the same position with one elbow to the ground (perhaps symbolizing surrender or some kind of strong pull?). The movements alternate from choppy to smooth, tracing the construction and deconstruction of natural movement. One movement emerges as throughout: holding the elbow with the opposite hand (as if holding oneself in place in order to continue to function). The soloist is surrounded by the other four dancers (they mirror her movement in unison). By locking one arm or leg with the other, the continuous flow of movement is punctured and interrupted (like jump cuts).

The second solo (by Geneviève Bolla) is composed of floor movements and quickly evolves into a duet with tightly intertwined and embracing movements also close to the ground, then transforms into a trio of twists and intertwined limbs, until all five dancers repeat the original floor routine. The embraces are powerful, not fragile, almost sexual, strong, supportive, structural, allowing movements to evolve. It’s as if they are forcing their limbs to move by using one arm to move another (perhaps symbolizing a struggle over control?).

The third solo (by Émilie Gratton) is the one that stands out as a male fantasy (or fetish) of femininities and feminine mystiques. We hear the sound of a knife being sharpened, three of the dancers take a seat in three chairs and are covered up with white sheets. We hear barking sounds as the soloist begins to undress, her movement is minimalistic, she is spectacularized and fetishized by a red underwear and a red mask. We hear the sounds of a whistle blowing on a water kettle (sounds of domesticity). The dance movements are mere poses, as the soloist is exposed to the spectators and the other dancers.

The fourth solo is by Marie-Gabrielle Ménard herself, and represents continuous breaking-down of the solo and revival through the other dancers. The embraces in this solo are softer, more sensual and even loving, a source of life against the brokenness and resistance and collapse, a way of slowly bringing back the soloist to movement (perhaps symbolizing perseverance).

The fifth solo (by Karina Iraola) is accompanied by heavy female breathing sounds and slow, swaying movements that become more aggressive and the breathing becomes more violent (loss of control?) until it breaks down into primal cries and noises (complete deconstruction of woman?). For the finale, the five dancers come together into collapses and embraces of support, falling and rising together, and in pairs, and building each other back up.

While all five solos are mesmerizing and are effectively enhanced by the lighting and music, and while the theme of female solidarity and support shines through, there is something unsettling lingering in the movements of breaking down and collapsing and the need of support. Is that how men (still) see women? Not competing with each other, as Ménard accurately pointed out, but instead relying on each other for continuous support, revival, and progress? As vulnerable, exposed, exotic jewels? Or are they seen as trying to escape their own infringements and casts?

As the press release informs us, “the five solos break the ice, delicately scratching the surface to reveal the gems of the soul and the jewels of being. The movement is both brutal and sensual. It is at times poetic, at other times turbulent, even inviting the spectator to enter into the private world of the dancers.”

Bijoux is performed January 18-21, 2012 at Agora de la dance.

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 62,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!

One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time is Daniel J. Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music (2007). It covers a wide range of disciplines (neuroscience, psychology, musical theory) to explain the various processes that go on in our brain when we listen to music. Why do we really like certain types of music and completely dislike other types? Why does certain music touch us at an emotional level even more than language or poetry? ”If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  Simply, no. Sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Similarly, there can be no pitch without a human or animal present.” Levitin provides eloquent, well-researched, and inspiring answers to these and similar questions, helping us to understand music, and ultimately ourselves, better. Here are some of his most interesting observations:

Creativity vs. theory: “For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change. … For the scientist the goal of a theory is to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory too will be replaced by new truth because that is the way science advances.”

Why we like certain music: “The appreciation we have for music is intimately related to our ability to learn the underlying structure of the music we like and to make predictions about what will come next. Composers imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are, and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and they won’t. The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music. … Songs that we keep coming back to for years play around with expectations just enough that they are always at least a little bit surprising.”

On success and failure: “On average, successful people have had many more failures than unsuccessful people. This seems counter-intuitive. How could successful people have failed more often than everyone else? Failure is unavoidable and sometimes happens randomly. It’s what you do after the failure that is important. Successful people have a stick-to-itiveness, they don’t quit.”

How our brains organize and remember information: ”The reason that chunking is important is because our brains have limits on how much information they can actively keep track of. There is no practical limit to long-term memory that we know of, but working memory, the contents of our present awareness, is severely limited. Generally to nine pieces of information.”

Mozart: ”A study made the newspapers and talk-shows a couple of years ago, claiming that listening to Mozart for ten minutes a day made you smarter. Specifically, music listening, it was claimed, can improve your performance on special reasoning tasks given immediately after the listening session which some journalists thought implied mathematical ability as well. US congress men were passing resolutions, the Governor of Georgia appropriated funds to buy a Mozart CD for every newborn baby Georgian. …Music listening enhances or changes certain neuro-circuits, including the density of the dendritic connections in the primary auditory cortex. … Whether these structural changes in the brain translate to enhance abilities in non-musical domains has not been proven, but music listening and music therapy have been shown to help people overcome a broad range of psychological and physical problems.”

Music and babies: “Musical preferences are influenced, but not determined, in the womb. There is also an extended period of acculturation, during which the infant takes in the music of the culture she is born into. … As adults, the music we tend to be nostalgic for, the music that feels like it is our music, corresponds to the music we heard during our teenage years. One of the first signs of Alzheimer’s Disease in older adults is memory loss. As the disease progresses, memory loss becomes more profound. Yet many of these old-timers can still remember how to sing the songs they heard when they were 14. Why 14? Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence they were emotionally charged. We tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neuro-transmitters act in concert to tag the memories as something important.”

Complexity vs. simplicity: “The balance between simplicity and complexity in music also informs our preferences. Scientific studies of like and dislike across a variety of aesthetic domains – painting, poetry, dance, and music – have shown that an orderly relationship exists between the complexity of an artistic work and how much we like it. Of course, complexity is an entirely subjective concept. What one person finds insipid and hideously simple, another person might find difficult to understand, based on differences in background, experience, understanding and cognitive schemas. …When music is too predictable, the outcome is too certain, and the move from one chord to the next contains no element of surprise, we find the music unchallenging and simplistic. As the music is playing, particularly if you’re engaged with focused attention, your brain is thinking ahead to what the different possibilities for what the next note are, where the music is going, the trajectory, its intended direction, and its ultimate end point. The composer has to lull us into a state of trust and security, we have to allow him to take us on a harmonic journey. He has to give us enough little rewards, completions of expectations, that we feel a sense of order and a sense of place. … At a neuro level, we need to be able to find a few landmarks in order to invoke a cognitive schema. If we hear a piece of radically new music enough times, some of that piece will eventually become encoded in our brains and we will develop landmarks. If the composer is skilful, those parts of the piece that become our landmarks will be parts of the piece that the composer intended as such.”

Wagner: “Safety plays a role for a lot of us in choosing music. To a certain extent we surrender to music when we listen to it, we let down our emotional guard, drop our defenses and let the music take us somewhere outside of ourselves. Many of us feel that great music connects us to something outside of ourselves. To other people, or to God. Even when music doesn’t transport us to an emotional place that is so transcendent, music can change our mood. We might be understandably reluctant then to let down our guard, to drop our emotional defenses for just anyone. We will do so if the musicians and composer will make us feel safe. We want to know that our vulnerability is not going to be exploited. This is part of the reason why so many people can’t listen to Wagner.”

Mirror neurons: “The purpose of mirror neurons is presumably to train and prepare the organism to make movements it has not made before. Mirror neurons may explain an old mystery of how it is that infants learn to imitate the faces that their parents make at them. It may also explain why musical rhythm moves us, both emotionally and physically.”

Music and language: “As a tool for activation of specific thoughts, music is not as good as language, as a tool for emotional arousal, music is better than language. The combination of the two is best exemplified in a love song, as the best courtship display of all.”

 Season 1, Episode 2, Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

President Bartlett (in staff meeting): Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc. After, therefore because of it. What it means is one thing follows the other, therefore it was caused by the other. But it’s not always true, in fact, it’s hardly ever true. We did not lose Texas because of the hat joke. Do you know when we lost Texas?
CJ: When you learned to speak Latin?
President Bartlett: Go figure.

Season 1, Episode 3, A Proportional Response

Josh (going to hide from CJ in his office because Sam slept with a call-girl): If she calls, I’m at the dentist, I’ll be back in an hour.
Donna: Got it.
CJ (sitting in Josh’s office reading a paper): Wow, are you stupid!

Season 1, Episode 7, The State Dinner

Sam: Do you think it a good idea to invite people to dinner and then tell them what they’re doing wrong with their lives?
Toby: Absolutely, otherwise it’s a waste of food.

Season 1, Episode 14, Take This Sabbath Day

Priest (to the president who is seeking his advice about capital punishment): You remind me of the man who lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rise up and flood the town, and that all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, I’m religious, I pray. God loves me. God will save me. The waters rose up. A guy in a row-boat came along and he shouted, “hey you, you in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.” But the man shouted back, I’m religious, I pray. God loves me. God will save me. A helicopter was hovering overhead. And a guy with a megaphone shouted, “hey you, you down there, the town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll take you to safety!” But the man shouted back that he is religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety. The man drowned. And standing at the gates of St. Peter, he demanded an audience with God. Lord, he said, I’m a religious man, I pray. I thought you loved me. Why did this happen? God said, I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a row-boat. What the hell are you doing here?” … He sent you a priest, a rabbi, and a Quaker, not to mention his son Jesus Christ. What to you want from him?

Season 1, Episode 16, 20 Hours in L.A.

Donna (when Josh is excited about finding out the Joey Lucas is staying at the same hotel and is coming to same fundraiser): Gather your rosebuds while you may, Josh. You know what that means? It means you should take this time to gather rosebuds cause later on you might not be able to.
Josh: Interpreting the classics with poet laureate Donna Moss.
Donna: I’m just saying, call her or stop bugging me.
Josh: Let’s call her.

Season 2, Episode 7, The Portland Trip

Josh: What are your plans?
Donna: We’re having drinks, we are having dinner, we’re dancing, we are having desert.
Josh: No problem. You can do all those things except for the drinks, the dancing, and the desert.
Donna: Josh!
Josh: You need to be done with dinner in an hour and five minutes.
Donna: Do you see what I’m wearing (holds her jacket open to show her red dress).
Josh: If you wanna have sex, you better do it during dinner.
Donna: This is the guy, Josh. This is a great guy. His name is Todd.
Josh: You met him for five minutes at a party.
Donna: I got a good vibe.
Josh: Ok (starts walking away).
Donna:  I have an excellent sense about these things.
Josh: Actually, you have no sense about these things. You have no vibe. You have terrible taste in men. And your desire to be coupled up will always and forever drown out any small sense of self or self-worth you may have.
Donna: You are a downer, you know that? I’m calling you Deputy Downer from now on.

Season 2, Episode 9, Galileo

Charlie: They told me he (the composer) got so nervous when he heard that you’re coming tonight, that he was rewriting the peace until 6 o’clock.
Bartlet: If he wants more time, I’m happy to take a rain check.
Charlie:  I thought you like classical music.
Bartlet: I do like classical music. But this is not classical music. It is not classical music if the guy finished writing it this afternoon.

Donna: A-Ha!
Josh: What’cha got there?
Donna: Precedent, baby!
Josh: Precedent?
Donna: Precedent – the mother’s milk of, you know, making your point and being right!

CJ (to President Bartlet): We have at our disposal a captive audience of school children. Some of them don’t go to the black board or raise their hand because they think they’re gonna be wrong. I think you should say to those kids, “You think you get it wrong sometimes, you should come down here and see how the big boys do it.” I think you should tell them that you haven’t given up hope and that it may turn up, and that in the meantime you want NASA to put its best people in a room and you want them to start building Galileo VI. Some of them will laugh and most of them won’t care, but for some, they might honestly see that it’s about going to the black board, and raising your hand.

Season 2, Episode 10, Noël

Leo (to Josh after his trauma counselling): This guys walks down the street when he falls into a hole.  The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription and throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by, “Hey, Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guys says, “Are you stupid, now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.”

Season 2, Episode 12, The Drop-In

Toby: CJ, where are you going?
CJ: New York, New York – it sounds so nice, they named it twice.
Toby: What are you doing there?
CJ: I’m receiving the Matrix Award from the New York Women in Communications.
Toby: For what?
CJ: I discovered a comet! What do you mean for what?

Season 3, Episode 10, Bartlet for America

Leo (to Josh over the phone, before his deposition): Don’t help me.
Josh: I’m gonna help you! Do you know why?
Leo: Because you’ve walked around with so much guilt about everybody you loved dying, that you’re a compulsive fixer?
Josh: No, Leo, no. ‘Cause a guy is walking down the street and he falls into a hole, see.
Leo: Yeah. It’s my day Josh, I gotta take the hit.

Season 3, Episode 11, H. Con-172

Amy (to Josh over drinks): Is it possible that you are so adult that you’ve constructed some non-sense problem so that you have excuse to see me?
Josh: Is it possible… I suppose you can say…
Amy:  I don’t believe you!
Josh: Hey, you threw a water balloon at me.
Amy: And?
Josh: I don’t know, I was just throwing that out there.
Amy: Look..
Josh: Like there’s not another reason you’re here right now.
Amy: I’m here because I thought there was a problem. … Why can’t you pick up a phone and say “Would you like to go out some time?” Why?
Josh: Look…
Amy: I’ll tell you why.
Josh: Do you need me in this conversation? Or are you ok by yourself?
Amy: Because this is what you like. This. Not anything else. This is the fun part.
Josh: That’s not true.
Amy: Yes it is. We’re not in the dorm anymore. I get paid a lot of money to do an important job and I’m not into getting diddled around by guys like you.
Josh: Ok, it’s like the fifth time you said “guys like you!”
Amy: That is not.
Josh: It’s the second time. What’s with guys like me?
Amy: If this thing were five minutes longer than you want it to go, you’d run for the hills. You hit and run, Josh.
Josh: It’s not true. (His cell phone rings, he picks up, and has to leave.) I have to go.
Amy: Yes. Indeed.

Amy (later that night, waiting for Josh on his door steps): You owe me half a million dollars and a drink.
Josh: I paid for the drinks.
Amy: Alright. 500,000 grant
Josh: What are you doing here?
Amy: Just hanging out. Why do you live here?
Josh: I do. I’m sorry I had to leave quickly before. I still can’t tell you why.
Amy: Was it a matter of national security?
Josh: No.
Amy: Would you tell me if it was a matter of national security?
Josh: No.
Amy: Ok. You didn’t talk to me much in school.
Josh: You were having quite a bit of sex with Chris.
Amy: There were times I wasn’t.
Josh: I studied a lot in school. I studied hard. In high school, and at Harvard and in Law School, my IQ doesn’t break the bank, and I wanted to do this, so I studied all the time. And I missed something. It’s like I skipped a year. ‘Cause I never learned what you do after you think you like somebody, what you do next. And everybody did learn, a lot of other people, anyway. I didn’t walk out tonight. When my phone rings at 11 o’clock at night, it’s important. Not important to me, but important. And I’m not puffing myself so…
Amy: You know what, maybe not so much for you with the talking (kisses him). Thanks for the drink (walks away).

Season 3, Episode 12, 100,000 Airplanes

Amy (to Josh): Don’t talk to me. I have wit, I have charm, I have brains, I have legs that go all the way down to the floor, my friend!

Season 3, Episode 13, The Two Bartlets

CJ: Duchamp was the father of Dadaism.
Toby: I know.
CJ: The dada of Dada.
Toby: It’s like there’s nothing you can do about this joke. It’s coming and you just have to stand there.
CJ: The cow made out of butter. That’s how I like my irony served, my friend.
Toby: I have a phone call waiting, that’s being related through four satellites.
CJ: Ok.

Season 4, Episode 1, 20 Hours in America

Sam: What’s the photo-op?
Ginger: It’s a man who’s shaken hands with every president since Herbert Hoover.
Sam: Do we have some sort of condensed readers’ digest index of… well all human knowledge?
Ginger: We usually just use Margret.
Sam: Oh well, we’ll have to talk about that, but we’ll do it another time.

Season 4, Episode 3, The Red Mass

Amy (to Josh): You know, I lost my job because of a strategy that you organized.
Josh: You lost your job in a fashion that ensured you 93 better offers.
Amy: That’s sweet of you to look out for me, but I liked the job I had. And when I lost it I didn’t pitch anything, I didn’t stage a nutty. I fought you, I lost, I had a drink, I took a shower. Cause that’s how it is in the NBA. You know what I do when I win? Two drinks. I didn’t start consulting with Stackhouse to piss you off, there are things here I believe in.

Season 4, Episode 13, Inauguration Part 1

CJ (to Danny): This is ridiculous, it’s been ridiculous ever since you came back.
Danny: What?
CJ: Do you mind if I turn off the lights?
Danny: No.
CJ: It’s just easier this way. (goes over to stand next to him) For three years I’ve been thinking about what might have been if it weren’t for the…
Danny: Yeah…
CJ: …conflict…
Danny: Yeah…
CJ: And I’m almost over it, I mean I’m right there, and you come back. Your scruffy face and your jokes and your incredible talent and your way of getting (takes a breath) getting at me. And I was thinking if we could…
Danny: Be adults…
CJ: (waves her wrist in front of his face) Do you like this perfume?
Danny: Yeah.
CJ: Do you like this blouse?
Danny: What’s gotten into you?
CJ: Do you?
Danny: Yeah.
CJ: Come here. (Danny slowly comes closer.) Remember when you asked me what exactly I’d do to have you? (She puts her hands on his face and draws him in for a kiss.)
Danny: Yeah.
CJ: I’d do that. (and walks away)

Season 4, Episode 14, Inauguration Over There

Bartlet (to Will after the Inaugural speech, and after promoting him to Deputy Communications Director): There is a promise that I ask everyone who works here to make. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world. You know why?
Will Bailey: It’s the only thing that ever has.
Bartlet (nods): William Bailey, reposing special trust and confidence in your integrity, prudence, and ability, I designate you to the post of Deputy White House Director of Communications and Special Assistant to the President.

Season 4, Episode 14, California 47^th

Toby (to pregnant Andy on the way to California on Air Force One, after he tells her she shouldn’t be flying): Also, you’ve got twins in there, you’re basically a minivan, how are you fitting into a seat? (Donna and another female assistant look at him in disbelief.)
Andy (after a pause): A-a, I saw him first, girls!

Season 5, Episode 20, No Exit

Abbey Bartlet (to Leo): You know what this life style does to the body? The minute your system senses stress, it releases a hormone that constricts blood vessels, contracts the heart muscles, stimulates the adrenal gland. You stay in this state for not a hundredth of the time that you and I have existed like this and the vessels begin to shred. The heart permanently constricts.  The intestines, the immune system shut down.  Relieving those conditions is the one responsible course of action I can take.

Season 6, Episode 10, Faith Based Initiative

CJ (to Leo, after rumours of her homosexuality circulated on the internet): I’m a heterosexual. I don’t know why I said that except that as of this morning I’m the most famous, not famous, but apparently the most powerful lesbian on the planet.  And the fact of the matter is, I’m absolutely crazy about this particular man I just met and had two fabulous dinners with him in the space of one week, a man who hasn’t had the courtesy to call me today, probably because he’s simply of the undependable gender, or come to think of it, he probably has even less of an idea how to deal with my alleged fictitious lesbianism than I do. So, he’ll just remain silent, like a submarine under the ice cap and drift away. Just drift away like the legion of other cowards for whom I spent my young life staring at the phone, panting like an exquisite Collie and waiting for table scraps. Until I became successful and suddenly started to scare them, scare them with the very independence they required for me to have, so that now I’m looking at some bad numbers. Really rough stuff, if you know what I’m talking about. But what was I supposed to do? Turn down an opportunity to serve the president of the United States, whom I believe in and adore? You just wanna share it all with someone, you know?
(Leo has no response).

Season 6, Episode 12, 365 Days

Leo: The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, esteem too lightly. ‘Tis dearness only that gives everything its value.
Will: Thomas Paine.

Season 6, Episode 21, Things Fall Apart

Leo (to CJ): We don’t want Russia and China building space bombers of their own.
CJ: Well, they’re going to build them anyway, if they assume we’ve got one.
Leo: But if they know we’ve got one, they have to build it.
CJ: This is Alice in Wonderland.
Leo: Yeah, some days it is.

Season 7, Episode 4, Mr. Frost

Matt Santos (to a school assembly): To be a person of faith is to have the world challenge that faith.

Season 7 Episode 11, Internal Displacement

CJ (to Will, who open the door for her, but bumps into her on the way out): Did you swallow an awkward pill today?

Cafés and Restaurants:

Café Museum (Operngasse 7, 1010 Vienna, U-Karlsplatz, 5th district) free wifi, open daily from 8am to midnight – Great food for breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner! Live music on Sunday afternoons. Designed by Adolf Loos in 1899, frequented by famous writer such as, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, Georg Trakl, Elias Canetti, Arthur Schnitzler, and Robert Musil. It still holds occasional readings by contemporary Viennese authors. This is my favourite Viennese café because it’s a perfect combination of traditional European coffee house essentials (with a great variety of coffees, teas, soy milk!, pastries, great menu, a great selection of international and local newspapers and magazines) and North American hospitality and comfort (comfortable booth tables with electric outlets for computers, free wifi, refilled tap water).

Landtmann Café (Dr-Karl-Lueger-Ring 4, 1010 Vienna, U-Schottentor) free wifi, open from 7:30am to midnight – favourite café of  Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Max Reinhardt, Marlene Dietrich, and Romy Schneider. Similar to Café Museum, but they have a covered patio, as well as outdoor seating. Similar menu and same desserts. Tends to be busier than Café Musem, but the service is not as great. Try the Wiener Schnitzel here!

Sperl (Gumpendorfer Strasse 11, 1060 Vienna, 6th district) free wifi, open 7am-11pm, Sundays 11am till 8pm – built in 1880, another traditional Viennese Kaffeehaus, also featured in Before Sunrise, in the scene when Jesse and Celine pretend to be calling their friends at home and telling them about how much they like each other. The food is not as great as at the other cafés, but the desserts are good. Specialty of the house: Sperl Torte.

Kleines Café (Franziskanerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, U-Stephansplatz, 1st district) open 10am-2am, Sundays 1pm-2am. Built in the 1970s, this is a tiny bohemian café. In a scene from Before Sunrise (1995), Jesse and Celine have dinner here. It’s always very busy and it’s hard to find a table, but in the summer they set up tables outside.

Café Central (Herrengasse 14, 1010 Vienna, U-Herrengasse), open 7:30am-10pm – built in 1876, frequented by famous artists, writers and politicians such as Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, and Leo Trotsky. Beautiful vaulted ceiling. The food is not that great, but the desserts and cakes are amazing! Try the apricot cake!

Demel Konditorei (Kohlmarkt 14, 1010 Vienna, U-Stephansplatz, 1st district) – one of the oldest and most famous pastry shops and cafés in Vienna. Started by the court pastry chef in since 1786. Great desserts and souvenirs in the boutique shop. The café is very busy in the summer when all the tourists flood there.

American Bar (Kärtner Strasse 10, 1010 Vienna, U-Stephansplatz, 1st district) – designed by Adolf Loos 1908. Very small, with limited seating, but very popular. The staff does not allow to take pictures inside, but I managed to sneak one.

WIRR (Burggasse 70, 1070 Vienna, 7th district) – funky and casual café that turns into a club at night. Limited menu, but good, food, mostly organic.

Gulaschmuseum (Schulerstrasse 20, 1010 Wien, U-Stephansplatz, 1st district) open daily 10am till midnight – despite the name, this is not actually a museum, but a restaurant. Opened in 1986, it has the largest selection of Gulasch dishes, ranging from vegetarian to 15 different kinds of meat.

Topkino (Rahlgasse 1, corner Gumpendorferstr., 1060 Wien, 6st district), open 3pm-2am, and until midnight on Sundays – cinema, café, and bar. Great space, great atmosphere, and great food! Quiet and bright during the day, cozy cinema that shows many documentary and Art House films, trendy but unpretentious and casual bar at night. Friendly staff, free wifi, but not enough power outlets.

Schweizerhaus (Prater 116, 1020 Vienna, U-Praterstern) – Beer garden and traditional Swiss restaurant, open since 1766. The season goes from March 15th till October 31, open daily from 11am till 11pm. Closed in winter. Stop by after a walk through the Prater park!

Café Sacher (Hotel Sacher, Philharmonikerstrasse 4, 1010 Vienna, U-Oper, 1st district), open daily from 8am till midnight – est. in 1876 by the son of the inventor of Sacher Torte (Eduard Sacher), and featured in the film The Third Man. The actual cake is not that great, despite the hype, but the café is worth a visit. There is always a line-up because it’s a tourist attraction, but there is a lot of seating spaces and the line-up goes my quickly.

Sky bar im Steffl (Kärntnerstr. 19, 1010 Wien, 1st district) open 9:30am – 3am – Restaurant, bar, and terrace over the roof tops of inner-city Vienna. Located on the top floor of the Steffl high-end department store, in Vienna’s first shopping street. Great for lunch. Try the Thai Coconut soup! Dress code at night.

Österreicher im MAK – Restaurant in the Museum of Applied Arts (Stubenring 5, 1010 Vienna, 1st district), open daily 8:30am till 1am (food served until 11:3opm) – the gourmet chef Helmut Österreicher has two restaurants in Vienna, one in the museum, and the other in city hall. Great place for all kinds of occasions, from intimate or casual lunch to big receptions. The design of the space is fun and impressive. Large terrace in the inner courtyard in the back.

Kim Kocht – Japanese and Koreen (Restaurant: Lustkandlgasse 4, A-1090 Vienna, 9th district; Studio and shop: Naschmarkt, 1040 Vienna), Tue-Fri 12–3pm and 6pm-12am – healthy gourmet Asian fusion cuisine.

Phil (Gumpendorferstr.10-12, 1060 Vienna, 6th district) – books, records, dvds, bar, cinema and café. The menu has funny names like “Bobobrot” for sandwiches and “Philburger.” Check out their website for special events.

Corns n‘ Pops (Gumpendorferstr. 37, 1060 Vienna, 6th district) Mon-Fri 7:30am-5pm, Saturday 9am-4pm, Sundays closed – All day breakfast, great, healthy food, organic and fresh ingredients, great atmosphere. Quiet and cozy.

Motto am Fluss (Franz-Josefs-Kai, 1010 Vienna, U-Schwedenplatz, 1st district), open 8am-2am, free wifi – this is dock on the river for the Vienna-Bratislava river speed boat, that features a formal restaurant on the first floor, and a café that turns into a bar with DJs after hours. In the summer, the outdoor seating on the deck is busy, but if you come before dinner time you can snatch a lounge chair. Their apricot ice tea is great! Just a few minutes walk from the Badeschiff - open swimming pool on a boat in the river – and the “Holy Moly” restaurant and bar on it.

Boutiques:

Yppig Eco Fashion Showroom (Yppenplatz 5, 1160 Wien, 16th district) - Cloed Priscilla Baumgartner is the clever and stylish designer behind the eco-friendly label MILCH, and the owner of YPPIG Eco Fashion Showroom at Yppenmarkt, a trendy marketplace in Vienna’s 16th district. MILCH was established in 2000, and symbolizes the recycling cycle of nature (transformation from grass to cow to milk).

Fröhlich (Zieglergasse 68, 1070 Vienna, 7th district) - Gabriele Rigby created her fashion label Fröhlich in 2009, and opened her store in Zieglergasse 68, in Vienna’s trendy 7th district in 2010. “Fröhlich” means “happy” in German, and stands for hand-made, original, individual, comfortable, and multi-functional clothes for women. The name also conveys positive, good feeling, and symbolizes “clothes made with love and dedication,” spreading good energy and thoughts.

Amateur La Boutique (Gumpendorfer Str. 88a, 1060 Vienna, 6st district) Birgit Rampula creates her own prints and designs clothes, fashion and home accessories. Her boutique is filled with creative items and souvenirs. Her style is very distinct, and may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the store is certainly worth a visit!

Park Concept Store (Mondscheingasse 20 1070 Vienna, 7th district) – great selection of international independent fashion labels, books, designer bikes, bags, shoes, accessories, and furniture.

Today you turned one week, and it will be a while before you can read this, but it’s a well-known fact that “days are long, but years fly by too fast.”

Before long you’ll be reading and writing and clicking away and multi-tasking, and using gadgets and programs that have not even been invented yet. I’m excited and honoured to watch you do all that and to help you in every way I can, teach you what I know, inspire your curiosity to know even more and to be an inspiration to others around you!

A few months before you were born I watched the first Superman film (for the first time), and what struck me most about the film was Superman’s dad’s speech just before Superman is sent to Earth as a baby. Marlon Brando’s character says (I’m paraphrasing): “Everything I am, everything I know, everything I feel, everything I learned, I pass on to you, it is part of you.” It’s quite remarkable because we never really stop to think about who we are, why we do the things we do, and why we feel the things we feel, until we come to a crossroad in our path and are forced to examine our lives. It also struck me because I’ve never thought of child raising that way – as an archive of all our experiences and wisdom and love and goodness; everything we’ve struggled to understand, everything we’ve fought to achieve, everything precious in us and to us – all that is part of you now.

Your grandparents moved all around the world in search of a better home for their kids. They had given up their families of origin, their careers, their cultures, their languages, many times over, just to build the life they wanted for us. And amidst all the losses and shortages and instabilities, they managed to always build a great home for us and to create the stability we needed. Growing up watching their courage and bravery is what allowed me and your dad to not be afraid to go to foreign places and to take on challenges we needed to take on. It means so much to your grandparents and parents that you are the first one to be born in Victoria, the place they decided to make their home. It was not an easy journey, but it was worth it. And now it is your home.

Your parents also had to work hard to build their life here. They had to give up their old homes to build a new one together. They are even more courageous and brave, travelling to countries where war, conflict, poverty, injustice happen every day, and fighting for others who cannot fight for themselves, trying to make their homes better and safer, so that other kids, like you, can have the same stability and comforts. They came back better and stronger and brought all their experiences and knowledge of different cultures and people and life with them, and started a life together, building what is now your home.

You inherit all that. All the cultures, languages, song, books, films, funny sayings and quotes (“Pivot!”), all the experiences histories, memories, all the achievements, your dad’s courage, strength, and his incredible sense of humour (when we were kids, we laughed so hard that I would get stomach cramps and get hysterical and couldn’t stop laughing or get off the floor!), your mom’s sweetness, generosity (and I hope her computer skills!), your grandpa’s musical talent, and your grandma’s wisdom, kindness, unconditional love, and hopefully her cooking skills, too, and maybe my soccer-goalie skills (you’ll need that!) Not to forget your cousins and relatives in Winnipeg, whom you’ll get to visit soon (get Marco to  teach you his dance moves! You’ll need that too!)

I am your aunt and your godmother and my job is to assist your parents to make your life as good and inspiring and as fun as possible. So, as my first task on the first week of the job, I decided to start a list of valuable life lessons, all of which I learned and tested  - the hard way – because even if I had been taught or told this by others, I probably wouldn’t believe them until I tried it myself (but that’s just me), cause that’s what they call “the value of experience.”

1. Foster positivity, happiness, and creativity for yourself and the people around you, every day, and don’t allow negativity, sadness, or laziness take hold.

2. Take responsibility, take good care, and give unconditional generosity to all your friends and even strangers. Be courteous. Courtesy implies respect and generosity, and not just politeness for the sake of getting what you want. Make a point of making other people’s days and lives easier and better.

3. Look up the answer to every question you have, and don’t stop looking until you find it. There is little that research can’t solve. Research is the answer to the question of the meaning of life (although some claim it’s “42″).

4. Read Shakespeare. It will pay off in ways you don’t even imagine.

5. Read. Aloud. To everyone!

6. Treat every person like they are important and invaluable, at all times, not only when you need something from them.

7. Figure out what you like to do, and do it well (Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do.”) Don’t watch too much TV or play too much computer games. Try many different things, pick a few that you really like, and do them really, really well.

8. To be really good and successful at something you have to practice it for at least 10,000 hours (scientifically proven), so never give up practising.

9. There is value in hard work for its own sake. It always pays off, even if the immediate rewards are not anywhere in sight.

10. Call and check up on, and remember to tell your friends and  loved ones how much they mean to you.

11. Always put yourself in another person’s position before you say or do anything. Also, wait at least 24 hours before responding to anything that makes you angry (the bad emotional response is called “fight or flight response” and it causes nothing but trouble and hurts people).

12. There is no failure; there is only a continuous succession of crises (also known as opportunities) and victories – it’s about how you react, what you learn, and how much you grow.

13. There is no winning without someone else losing. Don’t build your victories on other people’s losses.

14. Don’t pull girl’s hair at school; instead give them a cookie and tell them they’re smart!

15. Always share your food. With everyone! If you run out, make more. (Don’t steal – that’s also someone’s loss.)

16. Here is one that took me a long time to come to understand: you are not your thoughts or emotions. There is a part of you that is peace and goodness,  and that constitutes the real you, don’t lose touch with that part and listen to it, it knows best!

17. Education is more than a piece of paper (regardless of what your dad might say) – it’s a way of being in the world, and its value reaches beyond imagination.

That’s all that comes to mind for today. By the time you learn how to read, I’ll add some more to this list. Then you can make your own list. Happy one week birthday, my darling!

Cafés

This a supplement to my earlier post on Berlin cafés and restaurants. Last summer I got to discover some more hidden and known treasures in Berlin, and I hope you like the recommendations (please send me your feedback). Thank you to everyone who suggested these places to me while I was there, and to everyone who came with me to discover them! I also decided to add some book stores to the list because there are so many great ones. Here are just a few that I got to hang out at the past summer:

Friedrichhain:

Burgeramt (Krossener Str. 22, Boxhagener Platz, 10245 Berlin, U+S-Warschauerstrasse) – open daily noon till 3am. This is the best burger joint in Berlin. They have an unlimited variety of meat and vegetable burgers, toppings, sauces, and sizes. Everything is made from fresh ingredients and fast. Located right next to the Boxhagener Platz square (popularized by the novel and film), in the heart of Friedrichshain, a lively area with many restaurants, boutiques, cafés, and bars. They have now expanded into the building next door and have inside sitting, which will be good for the winter. I’ve taken many friends to eat there and they all loved it and wanted to come back to it. So tell your friends!

Datcha (Gabriel-Max-Str. 1, 10245 Berlin) – open daily from 10am. Great atmosphere and a fusion of traditional Russian cuisine and the culinary innovations of today (as noted on their website). Owned by the same people who run Gorki Park in Mitte and Pasternak in Prenzlauer Berg. The food is exceptionally good. My friend Jasmine and I tried everything from their pelmeni to lamb burgers.

Kaufbar (Gärtnerstraße 4, 10245 Berlin, U+S-Warschauerstrasse) – Everything in this café is for sale: the furniture, the décor, art, the dishes. Try their raspberry-mint soy milkshake!

Kinkibox Nähcafé (Seumestr. 21, 10245 Berlin) – Sewing workshop and café. They offer different workshops and events, as well as a selection of coffees and cookies. Unfortunately, I found out about this place when it was too late, on the plane to Vienna. But it sounded too good not to mention it here.

P-Berg: 

Café Fleury (Weinbergweg 20, 10119 Berlin, U-Rosenthalerplatz) – Open 8am till 10pm during the week and 8pm on the weekends. French café with black-and-white French New Wave pictures framed on the walls. Specialize in breakfasts, sandwiches, lunches, and deserts.

Heimatlos (Husemannstr 2, Kollwitzplatz, 10435 Berlin, U-Eberwalderstrasse) – great brunch place facing Kollowitzpark, a lively park surrounded by other cafés, shops, book stores, and restaurants. The name “stateless” refers to anyone who finds themselves in Berlin and is looking for a cozy place to hang out at (as the information provided on the menus states).

Wohnzimmer (Lettestrasse 6, Helmholzplatz, U+S-Schönhauser Allee) – open from 9am until last man standing. Cozy café with vintage couches, arm chairs, and chaise longues. Made to feel like your neighbourhood living room. Quiet and sunny during the day and turns into a lounge/bar in the evenings. Good for casual drinks.

Mitte: 

Clärchens Ballhaus (Auguststrasse 24, 10117 Berlin, S-Oranienburger Strasse) – Dance hall, dance school, restaurant, ballroom for special events, beer garden – all in one. First opened in 1913, this old complex survived the wars and divisions, and is one of the most exciting places in Berlin. They serve great stone-oven pizza.

Tadschikische Teestube (Am Festungsgraben 1, 10117 Berlin, S+U-Friedrichstrasse) – 5pm-12am, located inside the Palais am Festungsgraben, the tea room was a gift to East Germany by the Tajik Emabassy. Serving over 25 tea varieties, presented in a samovar, with assorted Russian snacks like pierogis with herbs and pelmeni, this is a hidden treasure, not easy to find without insider knowledge. Shoes off at the door, seating is on oriental cushions.

Schöneberg:

April (Winterfeldtstr. 56, 10781 Berlin, U-Nollendorfplatz) – great place for brunch, lunch, and dinner. A mix of German and world cuisine and a wonderful atmosphere. The back room has white table cloths and black-and-white framed photographs of Cary Grant. All the brunch items are good and the Schnitzel on the dinner menu! Jasmine and I made this our hang out this summer, and Nina told me she used to live just around the corner and go there all the time. We all highly recommend this place!

Café Sorgenfrei (Goltzstraße 18, 10781 Berlin, Winterfeldplatz, U-Nollendorfplatz) – closed on Mondays, open 10am till 6pm. Retro café with snacks, coffee, cake, and vintage 1950s and 60s antiques, books, postcards, and other collectables. Great place to find rare and unique souvenirs of Berlin. Hawaiian Toast is their speciality. My blogger friend Emily introduced me to this place. We had cake and browed through the collections of antiques and souvenirs.

Book Stores:  

Buchhandlung Walther König (an der Museumsinsel, Burgstraße 27, 10178 Berlin, S-Hackescher Markt) – 10am to 8pm, closed on Sundays. Great selection of art, design, and fashion books from all over the world. In close proximity to Humbolt University, Hackescher Markt, Museum Island, and the soon to be constructed Humbolt Forum.

Bücherbogen (Stadtbahnbogen 593, 10623 Berlin, S-Savignyplatz) – 10am-8pm, closed on Sundays – specialize in Art, photography, design, film, and fashion books. They have three locations in Berlin, but Savignyplatz is original because it’s in the brick arch-building under the subway tracks.

Do you read me? (Auguststrasse 28, 10117 Berlin, U-Rosenthaler Platz) – 10am-7:30pm, closed on Sundays – specialize in magazines and readings from around the world, fashion, photography and art, architecture, interior design, culture and society. An exhibition, entitled »what do you read?!« based on lists of books and magazines recommended by inspiring personalities is on display in the Reading Room in Potsdamer Strasse 98.

Dussmann KulturKaufhaus (Friedrichstraße 90, 10117 Berlin U+S-Friedrichstrasse) – open 10am – 12am, closed on Sundays – large collection of Berlin books, DVDs, Music, and now also a large English book section. Open late every day (except Sundays) and have occasional book presentations and readings.

pro qm (Almstadtstr. 48-50, 10119 Berlin, U-Rosa Luxemburg Platz) – 11am-8pm, closed on Sundays – specialize in Berlin books, politics, pop-culture, art, architecture and design.

St. George’s English Bookstore (Wörther Str. 27, 10405 Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg) – 11am-8pm, closed on Sundays – large selection of English books, special events on Wednesday night. Close to Kollowitzplatz.

“Berliner Chic” is a phrase associated with more than just the local fashion industry and its ready-to-wear clothing. Berliner Chic is a cultural concept that evokes history: the turbulent story of the efforts and strives of creative designers and manufacturers in Berlin, whose attempts to establish Berlin as a fashion capital have been continuously interrupted by politics, ideology, and war. It evokes the notion of quality (the tradition of handmade clothes) and a certain urban flare that persists to this day in the contemporary fashion scene. It also evokes entrepreneurial savvy: whether at the beginnings of the Konfektionsindustrie (ready-to-wear industry), in the ruins of post-war Berlin, or in the reunified global metropolis, men and women in the fashion industry managed to overcome limitations by turning challenges into opportunities. Berliner Konfektion (the ready-to-wear industry) is both an economic factor and a cultural-historical phenomenon.

Berliner Chic also evokes a sense of social and urban identity, female labour, Jewish extermination during the Third Reich, and last but not least, by lending its name to an exhibition that told the history of the city through its clothes, it also evokes stories of museal and institutional strives and achievements on the path of establishing Berlin as a fashion capital.

What distinguishes the Berlin fashion from its Parisian counterpart is this multi-layered and multifaceted social and cultural significance grounded in the city’s history, industrialization, topography, and most importantly its people. As Barbara Mundt noted, “in France fashion is art, in Germany, quantité négligeable” (Gretel Wagner, “Die Mode in Berlin” in Berlin en Vogue: Berliner Mode in der Photographie. Herausgeber: F.C. Gundlach, Uli Richter. Tübingen: Wasmuth Ernst Verlag, 1994, 145). Thus Berlin fashion seen as “negligible quantity,” as something usually taken for granted, begs to be examined. And those who work in Berlin today to promote, document, create, and exhibit fashion can be acknowledged as activists against a negligible lack of conception of what fashion means in a place like Berlin.

The history of the Berlin fashion industry is a turbulent roller-coaster of ups and downs. Tracing the locations of Berliner Chic throughout the city, one cannot help encountering the conceptual and theorized ghosts (Ladd) and voids (Huyssen) of Berlin, as well as findind completely new “scenes.” As fashion migrates throughout the city, one occasionally stumbles upon former fashion sites that are remnants of a lesser known history.  Some of these sites will guide us through the locational history of Berlin fashion.

Hausvogteiplatz

Moving chronologically, one would have to begin at Hausvogteiplatz, where the Berliner Konfektion was born in the mid-19^th century, where it grew to its heights between the turn of the century and the 1920s, until it was destroyed in 1933 and bombed out in 1945. The ready-to-wear industry was modelled after the Parisian haute couture and reproduced for the Berlin consumers by the system of Zwischenmeister (subcontractors) and Heimarbeiterinnen (home-seamstresses). This system allowed a very cost-efficient mass-production of garments because no expenses were spent on manufacturing facilities or machinery. Each home seamstress was responsible for her own sewing machine and took on contract-work from the Zwischenmeister.  The manufacturing of clothes was divided among 600 independent subcontractors, who employed about 100,000 women, who sewed all garments in their Mietskasernen homes (low-cost housing in the city center).

Around 1860 Hausvogteiplatz had 20 clothing manufacturing businesses, ten years later there were twice as many. By 1875 Berlin-made clothes were exported to Holland, England, Sweden, Switzerland and USA (Berlin Museum – Short Guide: Collections to the history of art and culture from the 16^th century to the present day, Berlin: Berlin Museum, 1987, p.100-106). The Berlin textile industry was mostly Jewish because Jewish immigrants came to Berlin from Posen around 1820 (Gretel Wagner, 114), and because up until the 19^th century Jews in Germany were restricted from most professions, except trade and retail. This system of producing relatively inexpensive clothes for a wide range of customers was new and distinctly different from the custom-made, tailored clothing that used to be created for the select few wealthy customers who could afford them.

Hermann Gerson, Valentin Manheimer, and Rudolph Hertzog were the first to start with the production-line manufacture of coats, capes and mantillas. Around the turn of the century, Berlin fashion-designers achieved an annual turnover of some 200 million marks. Of the 600 textile-manufacturing firms in Germany at that time, some 500 were in Berlin.

The world-wide economic crisis of 1929 and the coming to power of the National-Socialists put an end to the first chapter of the history of Berlin fashion. From 1933 onwards, the Jewish Konfektionsindustrie was subjected to anti-Semitic discrimination, boycotts, vandalism, and eventual extermination. In 1930, the German word “Konfektion” was out-lawed; and locally manufactured female lingerie was advertised with an emphasis on “arian.” Many manufacturers left the country; those who did not, were deported to concentration camps.  4000 Jews from the Berlin textile industry were killed in the camps.

The immediate producers of Berlin clothing were seamstresses: women and girls of the lower social strata. By 1896 there were 155,000 women employed in the Konfektionsindustrie. By mid-1920s there were 80,000 businesses with about 200,000 employees, most of whom worked in sweat-shop conditions (from home), for minimal wages, for (male) manufacturers.

According to Uwe Westphal, 49.8% of the Konfektion businesses were Jewish-owned. All of them were either closed or aryanised. Auerbach & Steinitz sold their firm to Hans Gehringer and emigrated in 1939. Hermann Schwichtenberg took over the firm of Hansen Bang, who left for New York. Leo Zaduck also escaped abroad, came back in 1945 and together with his daughter reopened his business in Berlin, which remained open until 1970. Gerson was mentioned in fashion magazines until 1939, after that changed to Horn (Gretel Wagner, 126).

Even after 1933, internationally-influenced fashion was made and worn. All influential magazines of the time, such as Die Dame, Elegante Welt, Der Silberspiegel, Die neue Linie, reported on the Parisian haute couture until the outbreak of war. Even the September 1939 issue of Silberspiegel reported on a fashion shows at Lelong, Creed and Patou.

In 1933 the German Fashion Institut was established by the Ministry of Propaganda, under the leadership of Madga Goebbels. Berlin designers continued to look to Paris for inspiration (Gretel Wagner, 127). After the siege of Paris, Hitler planned to transplant the Parisian haute couture to Berlin. He planned to create a street dedicated to fashion in Tiergarten. Each couture house was to have its own building there: Lelong, Worth, Piquet, Alix Grés, and Molyneux. Coco Chanel and Madeleine Vionet had closed their businesses. Berlin designers were also considered: Hilda Romatzki, Schulze-Bibernell, Elise Topell and Petz-Berger. Lucien Lelong, as the president of Chambre Syndical de la Haute Couture was summoned to Berlin to realize these plans. Yet the plans fell through when it was realised that skilled seamstresses, textile workers and manufacturing experts were missing (Gretel Wagner 128).

In 1940 Berlin designers formed the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Berliner Modelle (Society of Berlin Fashion) with the following members: Gehringer & Glupp, Covers & Seger, Hilda Romatzki, Annemarie Heise, Kuhnen, Schwichtenberg, Schröder-Eggeringhaus, Nina Carell, Suden and Lauer, Schulze-Bibernell, Aribert Schwabe, Werner Brüggemann, Rolf Horn, Elise Topell, C.G. Strobach, Hanns Bisegger, Lochte & Co. Dorit and Erich John (Gretel Wagner 129).

 Today, Hausvogteiplatz is a tree-lined square with a fountain encircled by benches, just a 5-minute walk from Gendarmenmarkt and Galeries Lafayette on Friedrichstrasse. One of the few original buildings, Haus zur Berolina, was reconstructed and modernized in 1997. The Jüdische Allgemeine newpaper (whose first editor in chief was Karl Marx) is published here by the Rudolf-Mosse-Verlag, resuming the tradition since 1837.

An info-board, erected in 1994 behind the entrance of the Hausvogteiplatz subway station, commemorates the extermination of the Jewish Konfektionsindustrie. In 1995 an art competition for a monument was won by Rainer Görss, his sculpture “Denkzeichen Modezentrum Hausvogteiplatz” (memorial of the fashion center Hausvogteiplatz) was erected in 2000. Three double-sided mirrors form a triangle; inside the triangle, at the foot of each mirror is a metal text-plate, informing about the fate of the Jewish manufacturers. On the steps of the subway entrance are names and addresses of Jewish fashion houses. Some are left black to indicate that the information is not complete, because some manufactures disappeared without a trace. In Berlin, history and memory are written into the surfaces of its buildings and squares.

The Bikinihaus

In 1945, Hausvogteiplatz lay in ruins; two-thirds of the decimated population of Berlin were women. They had to fight for survival in their daily reality of malnutrition, hard work clearing rubble, and abuse and sexual assaults from the Soviet soldiers. Clothing was made from materials smuggled and scavenged, and could only be purchased at exorbitant prices on the Black Market. However, the fact that high fashion was being produced at all is striking. At the time when mass investigations and trials were taking place in Nürnberg, as the Allies were negotiating over the future of German cities, prisoners of war were returning home, and the Black Market was the only economic structure in place, Berlin’s women were cleaning up the chaos created by Hitler’s war.

Gradually, the workers of Berliner Konfektionsindustrie returned to their old businesses, and unraveled the basements to retrieve hidden and left-over fabrics; home seamstresses brought out their surviving sewing machines, and former designers, like Heinz Oestergaard, Walter Schulz, and Hans Claussen, returned from the war and reopened their fashion houses around Kurfürstendamm. At first, American cigarettes and coffee were the currency. Under the Soviet command all available and imported fabrics were shipped to the Soviet Union. This created a fabric shortage and left the local population with what they had. Old rags were collected all over the city, torn and processed into new fabrics and used for making new clothes, the Lumpenkleider.

The first fashion magazines, Berlin’s Modeblatt and Chic, (both appeared in Oct. 1945, Modeblatt in the Amrecian sector, Chic in the French) were made available with the authorization of the Western Allied Powers.  Fashion in 1945, perhaps even more than in any other time, reflected the daily reality of the people, while high fashion that was portrayed in the post-war magazines simultaneously allowed a glimpse of a future beyond that reality. The first designs produced at the time had appropriate names, like “Schwarzmarkt” (black market) and “Stromsperre” (power outage). In the first issue of Berlins Modeblatt from October 1945 (which is 5 months after the German capitulation) the editorial section announced that the magazine does not attempt to be a “Luxuszeitschrift” (luxury publication), but rather a practical and entertaining fashion magazine “für Sie!” (for you), addressing Berlin’s women directly. The purpose of the magazine was to assist in re-vamping the wardrobe of “yesterday into nice and useful creations of today.”

Articles such as, “Die Kunst aus Wenigem viel zu machen” (the art of making more from nothing) with drawings and suggestions provided encouragement in daily life and practical tips for re-using old clothes, or making one new out of two old dresses. Advertisements announced the re-opening of sewing salons that offered re-modeling of garments, creations made out of “mitgebrachten  Stoffen” (used fabrics), due to the fabric shortages; hat makers advertising in English, Russian and French languages, catering to the Allied troops; hairdressers offering their services, as well as bars and clubs re-opening (Berlins Modeblatt, Oktober 1945, Herausgeber Chery Karl Gessinger, Chery Verlag, Berlin N4, Linienstrasse 145).

Besides working as Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) and cabaret singers or dancers, many women resumed their work in the fashion industry as seamstresses (of course for a lower wage than the other professions). A catalogue on the exhibition of women in the Charlottenburg fashion industry after 1945 records an interview with Frau Günter, who worked as a designer in one of the smaller salons on Kurfürstendamm. She stated: “Once I worked a whole day and through the nigh, until the following day at half past twelve because the collection had to be ready. Just with coffee, cigarettes, and a yogurt. That was not rare. I rarely worked less than 60, 65 hours a week, and almost never got paid” (Manuela Goos, Brigitte Heyde, Kleider Machen Frauen – Brochüre zur Ausstellung über Frauen in der Charlottenburger Modeindustrie nach 1945. Berlin: Heimatmuseum Charlottenburg, 7.11.1990 bis 13.1.1991, 5). “When we bought new fabrics, the manager stayed longer too because she could limit my creative ambitions in a business-like manner. Then I sat down and and made my designs based on the new fabrics. Much inspiration came from fashion magazines, which showed designs from Paris and Italy, with quality photographs, on which one could even see the seems. It all looks very chic, but imagine transfering that into a size 46! That was, in my opinion, the art: to transfer the designs in a way that one had a chic collection, which corresponded to the latest fashion and was wear-able” (Kleider machen Frauen, 5).

In July 1946, Tagespiegel reported that between Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and Halensee bridge there were 210 stores, 43 of which were fashion businesses. The Berlin Blockade of 1948 made the new beginnings very difficult. An industry trade show, the IGEDO (Interessengemeinschaft Damen-Oberbekleidung) was organized, and held its first meeting in Berlin. But the subsequent fashion trade show was held in Düsseldorf in March 1949, with 26 Berlin labels participating. Several of Berlin designers moved after 1945 to West Germany: Heinz Schulze moved to Munich, Irmgard Bibernell to Hamburg, as well as Hilda Romatzki and Grete Kiaup. Elise Topell moved to Wiesbaden, and Nina Carell to Baden-Baden (Gretel Wagner, 131).

After the Blockade, Berlin’s senate decided to invest into the fashion industry in order to create jobs for the 60,000 trained professionals and to boost an industry that was based on consumption. Most workers received 80 Pfenige an hour, some women home-workers were paid a lower wage per item sewn (for the sewing of a jacket in 1949 a home worker received 1,80 DM). The Charlottenburg Heimatmuseum exhibition also displayed a permit by the British Military Government (for Trade and Industry), which stated: “Authority is hereby granted for the following business to operate: Claussen-Kleider, Berlin W 15, Kurfürstendamm 217. Products authorised: manufacture of dresses, costumes and coats for ladies and children. Maximimum number of employees authorised: 62  (September 1946).”

Five months before the Berlin Wall was built, Berliner Morgenpost reported on the designer Hans W. Claussen in an article, entitled “Berlin – Capital of Fashion”: “As a young man, Hans W. Claussen came to  Berlin, where he apprentised at Hausvogteiplatz (then the center of fashion) and eventually opened his own fashion business before the war. Thrice was he bombed out, and thrice began from scratch. In 1945, with only a backpack, he gathered his fabrics for a new beginning and a new collection from the various warehouses” (Berliner Morgenpost, 26.3.1961).

In 1949 Berlin’s DOB-Verband (Damenoberbekleidung – women outer-wear association) was established  and moved into the Bikinihaus, across from the remains of the Friedrich-Wilhelm Memorial Church along Budapester Strasse in 1957. Designed by architects Paul Schwebes und Hans Schoszberger as part of the Zoobogen Ensemble, the Bikinihaus was originally missing the third floor, supported by columns and separating the top from the bottom of the structure it became colloquially known as the Bikinihaus. It housed the offices of West-Berlin fashion designers, like Heinz Oestergaard, Uli Richter, Hans W. Claussen, Staebe-Seger, and many others.

“Every fifth Charlottenburg worker was employed by the fashion industry. Far from the 90% production height of 1939, the West-Berlin DOB reached the production height in 1961 of 40% of the total clothing manufacturing production in Germany. Ten years later, the West-Berlin DOB production sank to 16%. The downfall of the fashion industry continued in the 1970s and 80s with only 50 fashion businesses, employing aproximately 3000 workers. On 13. August 1961 the Berlin fashion industry lost 7700 employees“ (Kleider machen Frauen, 11).

When the Wall was erected in 1961, and West-Berlin lost half its workers from the Soviet zone, the fashion industry had just gotten back on its feet.  After 1961, the West-Berlin fashion industry experienced a steady decline. In 1978 the missing floor of the Bikinihaus was filled in to create more room for the art exhibition space that was housed there from then on.  Since 2001, the Bayerische Immobilien Gruppe (Bavarian Real Estate Group) that owns Zoobogen-Ensemble has been planning to restore the fashion building to its former glory and use it for more retail spaces. In 1997, the Zoobogen area has been declared a heritage site, and can only be re-modelled from inside. The lower floors (including the parking lot in the basement) are supposed to contain a shopping mall, yet currently hold a number of discount stores.

In 1963, Helmut Newton photographed West-Berlin-based designers for the fashion magazine Constanze, for an article entitled, “Who makes German fashion?” In the photograph are: Hermann Schwichtenberg, Helmut Gschilm, Heinz Oestergaard, Marianne Lindermann (who took over for Aribert Schwabe), Ilse Brettschneider, Hermann Lindenstaedt, Detlev Albers, Ernst Kuchling, Uli Richter, Bruno Glupp, Peter Kübler (who took over for Hans Gehringer), Gerd Staebe and Hans Seger, H.W. Claussen, Bettina and Werner Lauer (Gretel Wagner, 133).

By the 1960s the Berlin Konfektionsindustrie was second largest in Berlin economy. Heinrich Mohr, the first director of Berliner DOB stated: “I will never forget the 8^th of May 1945. That afternoon we, a small group of survivors, stood in front of the rubble of our stores at Hausvogteiplatz and statred at the ruins.” (Susa Ackermann, Couture in Deutschland – Streiflichter aus dem deutschen Modeschaffen. München: Perlen-Verlag, 1961, 23). A whole industry was resurected from the ruins.

Post-war Berlin fashion industry was also a product of the economic miracle. By 1956 there were 450 fashion businesses registered with the DOB association, with 60,000 employees (Ruth Haber, “Die Modestadt Berlin nach 1945,” in Berliner Chic, 78). Still based on Zwischenmeister and home seamstresses, the industry resumed and flourished again. In March 1957, DOB-produced fashion was presented at the Dorchester Hotel in London. In May 1965, DOB fashion was presented at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. In 1962, the DOB association celebrated the 125^th anniversary of fashion production in Berlin (1837-1962).

On 13. August 1961 the Berlin Wall was erected and cut off the Soviet sector from the western zones. Many of the seamstresses came from the East. Overnight, the Berlin fashion industry lost more than half of its employees; a loss it never fully recovered from. In the late 1960s Claussen and Schwichtenberg closed their businesses, followed by  Staebe-Seger in 1971. The “shining years” were over (Ruth Harber 141). In 1982 the Mode-Messe-Gesellschaft (Fashion Fair Society) was established in Berlin. Between 1983 and 1990 “Off-Line” fashion fair took place at the Funkturm in West-Berlin. In 1991 the “Moda Berlin” fair was organized. With the establishment of the Munich Fashion Week in 1959, Berlin tried to keep up with its own Fashion Fair “Interchic” in 1969, which lasted until 1982. After reunification, in 1998, the “Verband Berliner Createure” (VBC) was established, and represented at the Berliner Chic exhibition at the Museum Ephraim Palais in 2002.

GDR Fashion Institute

 The GDR Fashion Institute was established in 1952, in Prenzlauer Berg, in the  Christburgerstrasse 4, with 17 employees, as the Institut für Bekleidungskultur (institute for the culture of clothes) and after 1972 renamed to “Modeinstitut der DDR” (Dorit Lücke, “Archivalische Schätze des Modeinstituts der DDR” in Berliner Chic: Mode aus den Jahren 1820-1990, Herausgegeben von Christine Waidenschlager, Berlin: Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, 2001, 92). In 1953, the institute moved into the former Warenhaus (department store) in Brunnenstrasse 19/21, with 180 employees. The institute was responsible for the conception and design of fashion in East Germany. For the seasons Spring-Summer and Fall-Winter sample collections were presented to the partners in textile and trade industries. Dorit Lücke also pointed out that fashion presentations were events to which entrepreneurs and media representatives came from all over Eastern Germany, but which were not open to the general public. The library of the institute was supplied with international publications, where the designers could look up the latest trends. Along with the seasonal fashion designs, the Institute supervised the uniform supply of the GDR Olympic team, wardrobes of TV moderators, wardrobes of orchestras and more. In 1956, the GDR fashion magazine Sybille appeared (Gretel Wagner, 144). In 1991, the archive, library, and the fashion collection of the institute was taken over by the Stadtmuseum.

Located on the corner of Brunnenstrasse and Invalidenstrasse, just a block away from where the Wall stood along Bernauerstrasse, the former GDR Fashion institute is now a large empty commercial real-estate space with a sign in the window: “Laden- und Gastronomiefächen ab 200m²” (store and gastronomy spaces for rent). Formally a luxurious 5-storey department store, Warenhaus Jandorf (Warenhaus am Weinberg), established by Adolf Jandorf in 1904 (3 years before Jandorf built KaDeWe – Kaufhaus des Westens), it was sold to retailer Hermann Tietz in 1927. Between 1938 and 1945 the department store was taken over by the “Union Vereinigter Kaufstätten” (union of department stores). Relatively undamaged by the war, it became the “Haus der Mode” (house of fashion) of the GDR. In 1955 an international fashion competition took place with retailers from Poland, Chekoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary.

Since reunification, the building remained mostly empty, with the exception of a few art exhibitions and projects. In 1993, it was sold to a Frankfurt real-estate company and renovated for commercial use.  In August 2003, an article in Die Welt announced the new plans for the building to be brought back to life as a “Projektkaufhaus für Wirtschaft und Kultur” (project-mall for commerce and culture), where graphic designer, architects, designers and artists would work. A website and a printed brochure were released to attract the future inhabitants of the project-mall. Yet, the building still remains empty.

After reunification, Berlin had many abandoned buildings – not only in the former East. Over time, many residential and commercial buildings have been reconstructed and gentrified, and in many cases, replaced by new buildings. Property ownership disputes, heritage laws, or lack of capital investment have often delayed the process of reconstruction.  This may contribute to the fact that these former fashion sites are still in existence and remain empty. Fashion has often been described as medicine against collective forgetting (Benjamin). We traced precisely this overlap of fashion, labour, and history that make up the story of Berliner Chic.

Check out a similar project in St. Petersburg: the Singer Building.

Alice

I’ve always liked the story of a girl’s adventures in a curious world filled with Cheshire cats, magic mushrooms, and white rabbits with pocket watches, and the even more bizzare world on the other side of the looking glass. But my serious obsession and fascination with Alice began after watching Tim Burton’s interpretation of Alice slaying the Jabberwocky in shining armour. I’ve been waiting for this type of empowered femininity since childhood, never satisfied with the annoying Disney princesses. In 2009, a year before Burton’s film release, Annie Leibovitz shot a Vogue editorial featuring different scenes from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with different designers contributing their design visions for what Alice wears. In the same vein, in April 2011, Montreal designer Denis Gagnon created a dress interpretation for Alice at the Toronto Luminato Festival.

Alice also features one of my favourite metaphors of contemporary life: In an essay, entitled, “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today: on procrastination, hiking and… the Spice Girls?,” Mark D. White recounts the Alice story in Through the Looking-Glass, when the White Queen offers Alice a job as her “lady’s maid,” with a compensation package of “twopence a week, and a jam every other day.” Alice protests that she doesn’t care for jam, and in any case doesn’t want any jam today. The Queen clarifies, “You couldn’t have it if you did want it. The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.” White points out what Wonderland’s logic is not as paradoxical as it may seem. We often structure our lives with far-off future goals in mind, often denying ourselves “jam” today in the hope for some “jam” reward tomorrow (or in the near future). This usually results in procrastination. He explains: “When the later or overall good can only be seen at the edges of one’s peripheral vision – in the ways that jam-yesterday-jam-tomorrow goods typically are seen – motivation turns out to be relatively loosely tied to it. So it’s precisely because there is no jam today – and we really want jam today – that we procrastinate when it comes to doing things that only bring jam in the fuzzy, distant future.” The solution to our jam-less existence, White explains, is that in order “to prevent procrastination with respect to jam-yesterday-jam-tomorrow goods, you have to provide some sort of “jam today,” a temporary, short-term goal, to motivate timely action.”

Berlin

I have been going to Berlin regularly since 2004 and every time I am inspired anew. It’s one of those cities that, like a good storyteller, always has a new story at hand, and makes you want to come back for more. My own writing about Berlin and its many facets, both academic and journalistic, also goes back to 2004. It started with some travel notes from my first visit, then the following year expanded to a Masters Thesis, then several academic articles and conference presentations, then a book on Berlin fashion, a blog, and currently in progress: a dissertation. In all these works, I can’t even begin to sum up why the city is so great that I decided to dedicate this much time and attention to it – you’ll just have to go and discover it for yourself. Let me know what you’ll find!

Brunch with friends

Brunch is a wonderful invention that allows you to sleep in and still get the best of breakfast foods at a leisurely time (usually after noon) and pace (usually most of the day), with the people you care most about and want to catch up with at the end of a work-week. A few years ago my birthday fell on a Sunday and I had my  friends over for brunch (which lasted all day, and included waves of snacking in between, as more friends showed up with more food and desserts and wonderful gifts). It was the best birthday, and the all-day brunches chez moi became a popular tradition, so much so that for my following birthday, my friend Maya gave me a book with brunch recipes, which we’ve yet got to use. I also started making lists of good brunch places and restaurants in many of the cities I’ve lived and visited.

Cherry blossoms

On the Canadian West Coast, the cherry blossom season starts at the end of February, announcing the arrival of glorious spring. It’s a truly wonderful thing, unless you happen to move out East, where the ice on the streets does not begin to melt until the end of April. For anyone wondering what the Canadian winters are like, the trouble is not the coldness, it’s the duration that’s difficult to accept. If the best time to be in Montréal is during the festival season in the summer, the best time to be on the West Coast is during cherry blossom season, while the rest of the country is still shovelling snow.

Claudia Cardinale

At first I didn’t like her looks, and I fell to my work again. But she, like all women and cats, who won’t come if you call them, and do come if you don’t call them, stopped short in front of me, and spoke to me… To people of her blood, liberty is everything, and they would set a town on fire to save themselves one day in prison. “We were not born to plant cabbages,” she cried. (Prosper Mérimée, Carmen, 1845)

Cocktail dresses / little black dresses

When Coco Chanel invented the little black dress in the 1920s, she defined and set the bar for elegance and understated stylishness for generations of women. Later, in the 1950s and 60s, the cocktail dress became a colourful variation on the little black dress, perfected, ever since, by female characters ranging from Holly Golightly to Carrie Bradshaw. There is something enchanting about putting on a well-tailored dress that has been designed to celebrate the female figure, with all its beauty and imperfections. And I don’t mean enchanting in a princess way, but rather enchanting in the sense that celebrates a long tradition and history of dress-making and dress-wearing, the craft and manual work, the visionary work, the inspirational work of empowering women through femininity and elegance, and allowing them to feel good in their clothes. Merci, mademoiselle Coco!

Coffee shops and Cafés

Vienna and Paris pride themselves on their historic cafés frequented by writers and artists since the mid-19th century, popularized in the collective imagination though books, films, photographs, and paintings. While they have been overrun by tourists, precisely because you can sit and sip a coffee where Hemingway and Simone de Beauvoir wrote their books, or where Freud read his daily newspapers, and even though the quality of food served there may not always reflect the inflated prices, what makes these places special is precisely their cultural history. Along with the tourists, they also attract contemporary writers and artists, thereby perpetuating the mythical legacy of these places.  Most Canadian cities are younger than some of these European cafés, but even cities with a rich cultural history like Montréal have not yet learned to capitalize on cultural heritage (except for Schwartz’s deli). What few legendary cafés and diners that once crowned Rue St. Catherine have been bulldozed in the gentrification waves since the 1960s. Even the legendary Forum has been turned into a boxy slab of post-modern architecture that now houses the AMC and Future Shop.

Eva Green

I looked for love, but I found freedom. And the freedom I found changed my way of thinking about the place of love in a woman’s life. I began to see that the proper place for love in a woman’s life was not relational love as the source but love generated in the quest for self-realization. … Feminist women stopped talking about love because we found that love was harder to get than power. … In reality, females of all ages who either learn how to love as children (and consequently are self-loving) or learn how to be self-loving later in life often confront major difficulties, because our culture has not yet been transformed in ways to support and sustain female well-being. (bell hooks, Communion, 2002)

French New Wave

For some reason, the history of cinema, for me, begins in 1959 with Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) and the filming of Jean Seberg (accompanied by Jean-Paul Belmondo) walking down avenue Champs-Élysées and calling “New York Herald Tribune!” to the passers by. In a way, everything filmed before that was just warm-up and rehearsal. But Breathless, and the films that followed (Truffaut’s 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, etc.) were not just a revolution in the history of cinema, but the way cinema was intended to be. I realize, I am disregarding a vast and rich history and cinematic cultural heritage prior to 1959 all around the world, but this observation is grounded in subjective identification, or what Christian Keathley calls a personal “cinephiliac archive,” rather than in objective facts. There was a sudden and noticeable freedom of spirit that the characters of the New Wave communicated and symbolized. Unprecedented freedom from social restrictions, obligations, forms, dichotomies, roles, norms; a freedom that even transcended the story-lines and spilled into the form and aesthetics of film-making, creating a new film language.

George

Rex Rexroth (coming to see a divorce attorney): There’s a lady. A young lady. She let’s me be myself.

Miles: Of course. And your wife is aware and/or has evidence?

Rex: Video.

Miles: Hah! To cut to the chase, forensically speaking, is there a prenup?

Rex (opens his mouth and closes it again).

Miles: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves”

Friends

How do I describe the kinds of friendships I enjoy with quite a few amazing, gifted, inspiring, generous, loving, caring, heroic people, scattered all over the world. Perhaps by listing the things I’ve learned from them over the years: unconditional love (the kind of love that lets you put another person’s well-being before your own), acceptance (“we don’t judge”), kindness and generosity (the kind that let’s you gladly give away your last piece of gum, or lend the last $100 in your bank account because you know your friends will replenish it twofold), empathy and compassion (ability to relate to, feel, and take on another’s pain), loyalty (ability to be faithful and true to oneself and others, no matter at what cost), equality (ability to give 100% each, not just 50/50 to quote Nina), creativity (“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edwin Schlossberg added, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”), and much more. It’s the kind of friendship that makes you want to be a better person (to quote Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets), every day, and then gives you the skills and opportunities to actually be that. Thank you, darlings! (You know who you are.)

Google

I don’t know what we did before gmail, google calendar, google reader, igoogle home page with different apps and extensions, google maps, google translate, google books, blogger, chrome, android phones and tablets that make all the other services even more accessible and synced, but my life was sure made easier when my friends Justin and Jonas first introduced me to gmail and igoogle. Long before I befriended some of the googlers at the Montréal office, I was already a fan of their work. Last summer in Berlin, I was among the few people fortunate to be invited to a talk by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt at the American Academy in Berlin. I liked his vision of the digital future that allows us to do what we already do more efficiently, faster, with more accessibility, and perhaps even with more creativity. Thanks, guys!

Holly Golightly 

Much like the heroines of the French New Wave films, Holly Golightly was the cinematic embodiment of the free spirit (the female equivalent of the Easy Rider or Sundance Kid), but with more style and unyielding elegance (keeping a perfume bottle in her mailbox), and with an honest vulnerability that her European counterparts never revealed. Drifting through her Manhattan jungle, in which everything is for sale, with little belongings (except for a few cocktail dresses and a cat), always surrounded by people, but at the same time always solitary, she is searching for her real self, among all the fluid identities, dysfunctional relationships, and the alleys and store fronts of New York.

Hugs

I like this photo (called Lutz & Alex, 1992) by the conceptual photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. In the early 1990s, he photographed friends, clubbers and ravers, often using a snapshot aesthetic. There is an immediacy in this photograph, as if we accidentally walked in on the couple’s private moment, but we can’t look away. It looks exactly the way a hug feels – it conveys what a hug conveys: closeness, warmth, comfort, security, belonging.

Laughter

Laughter is a flash of recognition; a moment of perfect balance between inner and outer worlds; a fast dip into the unconscious that the whole self revels in. (Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within, 1992)

Lilacs

If cherry blossoms are nature’s messengers, sent to announce the arrival of spring, lilacs announce the beginning of summer, which is the best message ever. And they make that announcement in such a beautiful and delicious way: in clusters of purple, pink, or white little flowers, that smell sweet and fill the air with summer.

Live Music

When I first moved to Berlin, my friends and I developed a substantial Jazz addiction, frequenting Berlin’s jazz bars once or twice a week for months, and listening to everything from world-class Big Band Jazz to experimental trios whose music could barely be recognized as music. Karen was dating a Jazz pianist at the time and he often recommended different gigs to us. It was such a great way to discover a new city, through a particular music scene, and Berlin’s was such a diverse and international music scene. During my last visit, past summer, I met a chatty taxi driver who used to be a Jazz musician and music teacher in Moscow, and expressed his dissatisfaction at the mediocrity of the Berlin Jazz scene. He was impressed that I lived in Montréal, whose Jazz scene he hasn’t experienced first hand, and couldn’t judge.

Marc Jacobs

I wrote a whole article about why I think Marc Jacobs stands apart from other fashion designers and why he does it so well. This past summer, he was invited to Berlin Fashion Week to be the honorary patron of the “Designer for Tomorrow Award” to support young designers. The five finalists received personal coaching from Marc Jacobs in Berlin and presented their collections to a select trade audience in July during Fashion Week. Listening to Marc talk about fashion and creativity in numerous interviews during his Berlin visit just confirmed my admiration. He inspires, the moves, he satirizes, and he does it with so much ease, humbleness, sincerity and grace.

Monica Bellucci

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive’s trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again. This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city’s streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten. New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something of the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape. Those who had arrived first could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap. (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972)

Montreal

How do I love thee, let me count the ways. Or rather, let me list the things that make this city so great: the mountain, the parks, tam-tams, anarchist soccer, Chu Chai, bagels, festivals, French bakeries, dragon sauce at Au Vivre, microbreweries, Café Névé, street fests, bike paths, music scene, apple-picking season, the view of the Olympic stadium from Ave. Mont-Royal, brunch, Olympic swimming pool in Parc Jean-Drapeau, chalets on lakes, Denis Gagnon, Old Port, crêpes in Square St. Louis. 

Photography

According to Susan Sontag, “all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability” (On Photography, 1973). What I like about photography is its ability to defy the rules of time. To capture moments that are fleeting and sometimes even unnoticeable. And its ability to allow individual experiences and glimpses to be shared with others. A photograph is never a solitary object or experience. Even a self-portrait involves a doubling, an engagement with otherness, it takes us out of ourselves and connects us with the other.

Roof Tops and Sun Rooms

I’m not sure when my fascination with roof tops started, but one of the first things I do in every new city I visit is scout out accessible roof tops. Unhindered by fear of heights, I find something zen about being high above the streets and the bustle, and the traffic, and even the other roofs. Something peaceful and even comforting, something that lets time cease to matter for a moment and all the worries of the world below seem small and manageable from that high up. But it’s not just the height for the sake of height (I’ve climbed up many domes and buildings, but am not as attracted by towers). Perhaps it’s the urban equivalent of the bond with nature and epiphanies one experiences after climbing a mountain.  There is a similar peaceful comfort about sun rooms with loungy chairs, ideal for reading and writing.

Ryan Gosling

Gus (in answer to Lars’ question, what it means to be a man): Well, it’s not like you’re one thing or the other, okay? There’s still a kid inside but you grow up when you decide to do right, okay, and not what’s right for you, what’s right for everybody, even when it hurts.

Lars: Okay, like what?

Gus: Like, you know, like, you don’t jerk people around, you know, and you don’t cheat on your woman, and you take care of your family, you know, and you admit when you’re wrong, or you try to, anyways. That’s all I can think of, you know – it sound like it’s easy and for some reason it’s not. (Lars and the Real Girl, dir. Craig Gillespie, 2007)

Sex and The City (the TV Show)

Carrie voice-over (after finally getting her Manolo Blahnik shoes back from her friend Kyra): The fact is, sometimes it’s hard to walk in a single woman’s shoes. That’s why we need really special ones now and then, to make the walk a little more fun. (Sex and the City, Season 6, Episode 9)

Carrie voice-over (the morning when Big woke up after his heart surgery, feeling like his normal self again): It was a shift imperceptible to anyone but me. But I knew, Big’s heart had closed again. Maybe it would reopen in another five years, maybe it wouldn’t. But I knew myself well enough to know that that’s not enough. For the first time all week, I didn’t feel like crying. Life’s too short. (Sex and the City, Season 6, Episode 11)

Spontaneous Art

Summer, Sun, and Parks 

Walking through square St. Louis on a beautiful August afternoon with my friend Erin, enjoying Montréal at its best, I was wondering why it can’t always be this nice. Erin said: “then nobody would get anything done.” Yes, Montréal is Montréal not just because it’s so glorious in the summer, but also because of the 6-months-long winters. In fact, it is precisely so glorious in the summer because of the 6-months-long winter. We often want to detach and distil the good from the bad, fighting and repressing the bad, thinking it shouldn’t be happening to begin with. No one really teaches us to even consider the bad and to look beyond it.

Tea time

Leo (to Josh after his trauma counselling): This guys walks down the street when he falls into a hole.  The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription and throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by, “Hey, Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guys says, “Are you stupid, now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.” (The West Wing, Season 2, Episode 10)

Since the late 1980s, Jean Paul Gaultier has enchanted the fashion world’s imagination with his witty and provocative attitude and humour towards fashion and sexuality, earning himself the notorious nickname l’enfant terrible of the fashion world. His visions of women (and men) in exaggerated cone bras and his reinterpretations of traditional corsets, epitomized by the costumes of Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition Would Tour, captured the Zeitgeist of the 1990s, with its changing attitudes towards gender roles, fashion, sexuality, and society in general.

From June 17 until October 2, 2011, the Montréal Musée des Beaux-Arts is showing The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, featuring more than 140 pieces from over 35 years of Gaultier’s fashion collections.

The curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot (34), a former model, joined the museum three years ago after studying art history at the Université de Montréal.

The installation is Montreal’s third time of showcasing fashion in museums, after the 2008 Yves Saint Laurent retrospective (which opened days before the designer’s death) and the 2010 Denis Gagnon exhibition.

Rather than conceptualizing the installation as a retrospective (which often marks the end of a fashion career), or displaying a brand-funded exhibition (like the Dior show at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow), which borders on an advertising campaign, the Montreal museum director Nathalie Bondil ensured that the Gaultier installation was fully funded by the museum, and presented a celebration of Gaultier’s vision and craft.

As Jean Paul Gaultier explained, “the idea is more to show what I want to say through clothes. It is to make clothes that you will love and wear.”

Along with the unprecedented international press attention, cultural events and celebrations that accompanied the opening, and the flood of international visitors this summer, the installation catapulted Montréal’s Musée des Beaux-Arts into the leading ranks of fashion exhibiting institutions (like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and MOMA in New York), all of which are in the process of re-constructing and re-conceptualizing a new era of fashion displayed in museums.

“I wanted to create an exhibition on Jean Paul Gaultier more than any other couturier because of his great humanity,” explained Nathalie Bondil, director and chief curator of the museum. “Beyond the technical virtuosity resulting from exceptional expertise in the various skills involved in haute couture, an unbridled imagination and ground‐breaking artistic collaborations, he offers an open‐minded vision of society, a crazy, sensitive, funny, sassy world in which everyone can assert his or her own identity, a world without discrimination, a unique ‘fusion couture.’ Beneath Jean Paul Gaultier’s wit and irreverence lie a true generosity of spirit and a very powerful message for society. His humanist aesthetic touches me deeply.”

The innovative feature of the exhibition are mannequins whose faces are brought to life by video. This very special technique of projecting video onto a three‐dimensional mask combines technology and craft, with the actor’s own video image projected onto his or her sculpted head. The technique was developed more than fifteen years ago by Denis Marleau with UBU, his Montreal theatre company. For this project, initiated by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Marleau, Stéphanie Jasmin and their team created the mannequins, whose quirky, poetic or joyful presence captures the spirit of installation art.

Keenly interested in all the world’s cultures and countercultures, Gaultier has picked up on the current trends and proclaimed the right to be different, and in the process conceived a new kind of fashion in both the way it is made and worn. Through twists, transformations, transgressions and reinterpretations, he not only erases the boundaries between cultures but also the sexes, creating a new androgyny or playing with subverting hypersexualized fashion codes.

According to Gaultier, “to conform is to give in.” How can we fight the uniformity of the masses? How can we tweak the sexual, aesthetic, ethnic and religious codes that determine social conventions? For it is difficult to become authentically oneself. It is a long process to accept ourselves as we are—a changing being and not a monolith, a personality that is constructing and realizing itself over time, rather than deteriorating or destroying itself.

“Jeans become better and better looking with age. It’s the same with people,” Gaultier pointed out. “The sign of time passing and expression lines show character. Old people should be full members of our society— we can all benefit from their experience.” This is why this shrewd psychologist’s creations, beyond brands and commerce, act as an antidepressant, a happy pill, a self‐esteem booster. Fashion is for everyone, can be worn by everyone, regardless of age, sex or beauty, and Gaultier’s designs are meaningless unless worn. They cannot be reduced to an image, a caricature or an act of provocation: “You cannot move people with outlandish abstractions that have no meaning—they just become a way of pleasing the designer. Our work is to express urges, needs, yearnings.”

Erasing the boundaries between fashion and art is a project pursued by many designers and curators alike.

Andy Warhol remarked: “I think the way people dress today is a form of artistic expression. Saint Laurent, for instance, has made great art. Art lies in the way the whole outfit is put together. Take Jean Paul Gaultier. What he does is really art.” (Mondo Uomo, 1984).

Fashion photography is also a major focus of attention, thanks to loans of, in many cases, never‐before‐seen prints from contemporary photographers and renowned contemporary artists (Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Erwin Wurm, David LaChapelle, Richard Avedon, Mario Testino, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, Pierre et Gilles, Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, Paolo Roversi and Robert Doisneau…).

The many artistic collaborations that have characterized Gaultier’s world are examined: in film (Pedro Almodóvar, Peter Greenaway, Luc Besson, Marc Caro and Jean‐Pierre Jeunet) and contemporary dance (Angelin Preljocaj, Régine Chopinot and Maurice Béjart), not to mention the world of popular music, in France (Yvette Horner and Mylène Farmer…) and on the international scene (Kylie Minogue and especially Madonna, whose friendship with Gaultier has led her to graciously lend two iconic corsets from her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour).

“Some people saw my work as a form of provocation, which in certain respects was true. My designs corresponded to the desires of the time, and I never deliberately tried to shock, even if I was aware that my clothes would create a stir. I’m still astounded by some people’s reaction to things I consider quite normal. If my designs have an effect on the minority that likes to wear them, it’s no longer a question of provocation. And maybe this minority will become a majority. That’s actually what has happened with many of my designs: the first time, people may have been very surprised by them, but then they got used to them and now they’re wearing them. I always liked getting a reaction out of people. It’s the desire of others that feeds my own desire. There’s a very fine line between provocation and originality.” (Jean Paul Gaultier)

“All women have a masculine sensibility, and all men, a feminine one. A masculine woman never really causes a scandal, she is just considered eccentric. An effeminate man, on the other hand, is immediately singled out. Fashion is still full of outdated conventions and clichés that no longer fit the times. Take, for example, the fact that men’s jackets button up on the right, so men can more easily access their wallets to pay for women. Our culture has always valued the masculine side of men more than a certain femininity, a certain sensitivity. That’s why I like reversing the roles, breaking the established conventions that no longer make sense today.” (Jean Paul Gaultier)

Long stem roses are the way to your heart / But he needs to start with your head
Satin sheets are very romantic / What happens when you’re not in bed
You deserve the best in life/ So if the time isn’t right then move on
Second best is never enough/ You’ll do much better baby on your own

Express yourself /(You’ve got to make him)
Express himself / Hey, hey, hey, hey
So if you want it right now, make him show you how
Express what he’s got, oh baby ready or not.

Since it was launched in 1993, Classique has been one of the bestselling fragrances in the world.

“I developed the bottle and packaging at a time when I was very intrigued by the insides of garments. For example, I’d put the lining and topstitching on the outside of suit jackets. For the bottle, I was keen on the concept of the human body, along with which I wanted to incorporate what I remembered of my grandmother’s corsets. For the packaging, I wanted to appropriate an everyday object, something solid and functional like a can, and use it in blatant contradiction to the traditionally luxurious perfume bottle. It was technically very difficult to make a flesh‐colored corset bottle or even to give a tin can the shape of a corset. So, the idea was to cover a body‐shaped bottle with a corset and then package it in a can something that was protective but cold. I wanted it to seem real. Through that somewhat incompatible combination, the body thus became the content.”

“My mother dressed me in sailor‐striped sweaters. They go with everything, never go out of style and probably never will. There were also other influences: my grandmother, Coco Chanel, Jean Genet, Popeye, Tom of Finland, Rainer Fassbinder and his film Querelle, the title character of which was the ultimate sailor, a hypersexualized gay symbol, a fantasy, an icon, a form of virility that could be ambiguous. . . . With their tattoos, sailors are also associated with the bad boy image, which I love, the Casanova on the fringes of society with a mistress or lover in every port! The uniforms are so gorgeous and can be very elegant. I particularly like sailor pants, which I’ve adapted in many of my men’s and women’s collections. When I started in fashion, I had already adopted the sailor-striped sweater as my uniform; that way, I wouldn’t have to drive myself crazy trying to figure out what to wear. I wore it with a kilt, leather pants, my men’s skirt, a tuxedo!”

So, what is it about Jean Paul Gaultier that still captures our imagination and touches us in ways that other designers, clothes, fragrances, images, fantasies fail to do? As with all great art and inspiring creations, the artist, designer, filmmaker, musician, etc. communicates our own subconscious desires and un-lived feelings back to us in their own medium.

Jean Paul Gaultier not only participated, but made accessible and possible the gender inversion and revolution of the early 1990s (as Madonna famously summed it up: “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl”). A whole generation of girls and boys was raised to cause “gender trouble” by playfully, aesthetically, or politically rebelling against restricting social norms. Gaultier provided the aesthetic images and visions, Madonna provided the music and lyrics.

But above all, Gaultier continues to inspire us to live and dream and to “express ourselves” beyond the confines of the possible, established, and acceptable.

Following its presentation in Montreal, the exhibition will embark on an international tour, with presentations at the Dallas Museum of Art (November 13, 2011 ‐ February 12, 2012), the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young (March 24 ‐ August 19, 2012), the Fundación Mapfre – Instituto de Cultura, Madrid (September 26 – November 18, 2012), and the Kunsthal Rotterdam, the Netherlands (February 9 – May 12, 2013).

Media and messages: 

Berlin is the city for new and non-traditional media. It is becoming increasingly apparent that just as for city-guide publishers, it may be a futile project to put anything about Berlin in print. The city changes daily, renaming its streets and metro stops, replacing old buildings and establishments with new ones, and generally moving the sand from one “beach-bar event” to another.

Berliner Chic emerged as we simply followed the changing mediascapes of the city. Since its publication earlier this year, in February 2011, several stores we mention in Chapter 7 no longer exist (Berlinomat, CUBE, Black Roses Berlin), some have moved, others re-conceptualized. This illustrates that Berlin is not only still “condemned to always be changing, and never to just be,” (Karl Scheffler) but that it also has become a city of and for new media – books may no longer be the adequate medium to keep up with the changes.

What is Berliner Chic? 

We open our discussion of Berliner Chic with the argument that Berlin managed “in the age of globalised turbo-capitalism to turn its image as “poor but sexy” into a successful brand and to become, in the process, a fashion showplace that attracts the young, hip, and creatively industrious as well as increasing numbers of tourists” (Berliner Chic, p.16). As the man behind the notorious phrase, Klaus Wowereit, is campaigning for re-election in September 2011, Berlin is perhaps no longer poor. But will it still be sexy? Will it withstand the sweeping gentrification and its own increasing popularity in the world (to be magnified by the completion of the new international airport)? Or will it become just another global metropolis?

“As Nadine Barth remembers in her 2007 documentation of the city’s fashion scene: ‘here was where ‘real life’ was filmed, a new living arrangement tested, the beginnings of reality TV. With barbecue parties on the roof, visits to the club Tresor and creative discussions about behaviour, friendship and style. In the evening the crew would go to ‘Fruit and Vegetables,’ a bar in the Oranienburger Straße, across from it the Tacheles held its first wild art exhibitions.” However, just as the Fruit and Vegetables bar had once been a store that sold fruit and vegetables, by the end of 2007 the bar had again changed, this time mutating into an “awful tourist dive with tropicana cocktails and heat lamps by the door,’ while the creative scene of interest to Barth crept progressively northeast up Kastanienallee, before decamping for the newly hip Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain areas” (Berliner Chic, p.188).

What is Berlin fashion?

Berlin’s fashion, to this day, is ready to wear (pret-a-porter) rather than haute couture. As we pointed out, “in Berlin one rather finds the fashion of industrialization; that is, fashion understood as a modern culture industry that has been formative for both Berlin’s history and its image” (Berliner Chic, p.16).

Today, Berlin fashion is mostly eco-friendly, comfortable, yet innovative and stylish, avant-garde and daring. Often it has playful names, or features “Berlin” in its title or logo (for example, ic! Berlin, Lala Berlin, etc).

Where is Berliner Chic? 

Over the past few months I found myself giving the “Chapter 7 Tour” of Berliner Chic to several friends, journalists, and fashion professors. At some point, I started longing for a “Berliner Chic app,” which unfortunately I don’t have time to build myself.

Most of the boutiques regularly frequented by locals and tourists alike are spread in the areas between Alexanderplatz, Hackescher Markt, and Rosenthaler Platz, and stretching north along Kastanienallee. This is where today’s Berliner Chic is crafted and consumed. Of course Bergmannstrasse in Kreuzberg, and several streets in Friedrichshain also deserve their own fashion maps.

“Potsdamer Platz, Friedrichstraße and the Hackesche Höfe are three attempts to develop lifestyle-oriented centers of consumption that, in order to achieve sustainability, cater to well-heeled, lifestyle-seeking visitors as much, if not more, than locals. What success Berlin has had is due to its establishing itself as a “cheap, yet cool, destination for holidaymakers” (Berliner Chic, p.188).

Some boutiques are easier to find than others. “The store satirized by Ralph Martin in his first Berlin novel, is called Apartment and is located at Memhardstrasse 8. From the outside, the building looks like an empty gallery. Owner Christof Rücker seems to be avoiding walk-in customers on purpose, and it is precisely this image that has succeeded in garnering his store a reputation that can now, thanks to Martin, be considered emblematic of Berlin’s new fashion scene, and which will live on in Martin’s work as such” (Berliner Chic, p.202-03).

Why Berliner Chic?

The Children of the Fashion Zoo: As we all know, the fashion world can be quite the circus and the zoo – with its unnatural habitats and caged-in environments (like the shows, press rooms, VIP rooms, etc.), its giraffe-like creatures, with its postures and poses, with parodies of reality and unrealistic projections, with spectacle, fetishism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and with a lot of people watching all around the world…

Perhaps this may seem as a harsh critique from someone who co-wrote a book on Berlin fashion and culture, but I want to take this opportunity to define and differentiate “Berliner Chic.”

What interests me in the (Berlin) fashion world are the histories, stories, and imaginaries, the way in which the various fashion (hi-)stories of (Berlin) fashion are told and shown, and how it relates to and affects people’s lives in a city (like Berlin). I find it important not to limit fashion to the elitist world of limited-access catwalks and showrooms, and ridiculous diva-esque designers dictating their tastes and celebrating their vanities, but to approach the whole concept of fashion differently, as an integral part of a city’s culture, of people’s identity, and as a cultural heritage that transcends market capriciousness. As Susan Ingram and I pointed in our book, Clio, the ancient muse of history, is our woman for this project.

Clio & Co.

“Clio, the Greek muse of history, is not only a Romantic. As Theodore Ziolkowski implicitly established in his work on German academic historiography, she is also a Berlinerin” (Berliner Chic, p.67)

In his welcoming address, printed in the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin Magazine, Klaus Wowereit, the mayor of Berlin, announced: “Right where the Berlin Wall once stood, hip neighborhoods are buzzing with life. The city’s optimism and can-do attitude have inspired talented young people from all over the world. And they come to Berlin to make the most of their opportunities here… Fashion “made in Berlin” has become a trademark in its own right, and Berlin Fashion Week is its most important showcase” (Nr. 12, Spring / Summer 2012, p.5).

Connecting Berlin to its history in light of fashion is a clever way to capitalize on Berlin’s historical and cultural heritage. History and culture promote fashion (they become brands), and in turn, fashion promotes culture (by way of tourism). What becomes apparent from this cultural policy is a strategy to capitalize on culture industries, in a process of what we called “branding Berlin“ in our last chapter.

“Part of the painful lessons of history that Berlin’s past represents is a deeply developed suspicion of power, both social and political, that has become part of the city’s global mystique” (Berliner Chic, p.213).

All Butter and no Jam

Looking for “Berliner Chic” at Berlin Fashion Week proved at times frustrating and exhausting. All the main-stream events were stressful and rather unpleasant (with a few exceptions, like the In Fashion Berlin trade show at Radialsystem, and the Modeschule Berlin-Weissensee fashion show at the House of World Cultures).

Berlin Bread and Butter confirmed what fashion professionals around the world still suspect – Berlin is for partying, Paris is for business. The theme for the BBB anniversary party concept was “Back to the Future” – an attempt to reference (consciously or unconsciously) Berlin’s anarchist, freedom-seeking, empty, un-reconstructed, punk past, while simultaneously looking into its increasingly commercialized present and future. The result had a rather unpleasantly chaotic effect, and could perhaps be described as a nostalgic acid trip, re-imagined by someone too young to have been there and to have witnessed it all first hand; i.e. second-hand nostalgia. The event felt like a mix of what one imagines to be typical German things: a street festival beer and sausage, a sandbar on the Spree, electronic music, and underground art one imagines to have originated in a former squat. Fashion, not to mention chic, fell by the sideways. Spectacle, kitsch, and commerce reigned above all else.

Who’s poor? Who’s sexy? 

“Whether the historical weight of the country’s self-image as ‘a socially caring, morally cohesive democracy enshrined in the post-war consensus’ (P. Anderson) can counterbalance its capital’s new “poor but sexy” image enough to sway Berlin’s financial fortunes remains a question. However, it seems doubtful that fashion of the luxe variety will eventually manage to put an end to Berliner Chic in all of its historically charged modern glory. Because of that history, it is difficult to imagine Berlin as anything other than a “uniquely politicized…historical minefield” (Ladd 3) that is not just the epitome of the modern city, but also a city of survival, an imagined environment conducive to unglamorous but appealing forms of living and moving on” (Berliner Chic, p.214).

Wowereit and his think-tanks and campaign managers are doing their utmost best; they invested into culture, they got the “creative classes” (Yuppies) and their “creative industries” (start-ups) and a whole lot of talent and creativity in-between – the capital and investors will follow (right after the international airport completion). But the question on everyone’s minds seems to be “at what cost”? The term used to express this anxiety in light of looming change is “gentrification” – how does one raise the wages, generate profits, and provide for the young and the old, without sacrificing freedoms and comforts? This is a question for future economists and sociologists. In the meantime, Berlin is caught somewhere between nostalgia and exhilarating progress. And it’s a fascinating journey. The future trajectory of Berliner Chic, its media and its messages remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

Though seeming to deal with aesthetic problems, [modern art] is really performing a work of psychological education on the public by breaking down and destroying their previous aesthetic views of what is beautiful in form and meaningful in content. The pleasingness of the artistic product is replaced by chill abstractions of the most subjective nature which brusquely slam the door on the naïve and romantic delight in the senses and on the obligatory love for the object. (Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1957)

Orpheus mourned her to the upper world, / And then, lest he should leave the shades untried, / Dared to descend to Styx… (Ovid, Metamorphoses)

On May 22, 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of artists to resign the Viennese Künstlerhaus, a state-sponsored art institution under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture. The dispute was not merely a conflict between contrasting aesthetics, but rather a question of value and status of art itself. The resigning artists believed that art and culture should be left to the artists, rather than statesmen. This break led to the formation of the Vienna Secession and Vienna’s entrance in the ranks of the European avant-garde.

Having established his reputation decorating several buildings along the newly designed Ringstrasse, Gustav Klimt took a daring step away from the tastes of the powerful patrons. Starting with the three paintings commissioned by the University of Vienna, Klimt embarked on a modernist quest, descending into the darkness of the unconscious and unveiling the instinctual drives that Freud had been writing about around the same time.

The three University paintings represent the epitome of Klimt’s use of classical myth and symbolism to communicate a critique of the condition of modernity. The quest for psychological truth in art resulted in a scandal for Klimt; however the door to a new type of artistic creativity had been opened, not only allowing artistic independence from the bourgeois convention, but also leading to increasingly radical critique of the status quo.

Vienna at the turn of the century was the place where the antiquated traditional order met twentieth-century modernism. Its center had been newly rebuild and decorated with buildings designed by Otto Wagner. Since the days of the waltz, Vienna was famous for its culture. Artists and writers from across the Austro-Hungarian Empire were drawn to the capital and its aesthetic life, its cafes and theatres. At the time Vienna was also the medical center of the world; it was where Sigmund Freud had come to practice psychoanalysis. As the multicultural empire itself, Vienna was not free from social tensions and became a hotbed of conflicting world views. While the aristocracy, the professionals, and the conservatives wanted to uphold traditional values, a new generation of modern artists and writers was emerging, advocating new views. Because of its traditionalism, Vienna was considered provincial by the rest of Europe. The Secessionists wanted to break that isolation, organizing and participating in international exhibitions and bringing foreign art to Vienna to cultivate the public taste. Controversial transformations were also taking place in literature and philosophy.

With the help of Freud’s discoveries in psychoanalysis the “immoral” was recognized as a source of creation. The emergence of an aesthetic subculture was a result of the search for an artistic community, a Künstlerschaft that would serve as a forum in which artists could awaken the desire for beauty and freedom of thought.

Unlike the smaller, aesthetically oriented groups that would usher in modernism throughout the rest of Europe (Der Blaue Reiter and Die Bruecke in Germany, Picasso’s circle in France), the Secession was primarily concerned with controlling and administering the circumstances under which art was created.

The first exhibition of the Secession was extremely successful; 57,000 visitors came to see the show; 218 works had been sold. The foundation of the Secession house was laid on April 28, 1898. It was designed by Joseph Olbrich, a student of Otto Wagner. The building represented one of the best-known examples of European architecture at the transition from historicism to modernism.

Written in gold above the entrance was the slogan, “to the age its art, to art its freedom.” At the Kunstschau exhibition in 1907 Klimt spoke of an “ideal community of those who create and those who enjoy,” and expressed his regrets that “public life was predominantly preoccupied with economic and political matters.”

As the Secessionists explained in the first issue of their journal, Ver Sacrum, the name of the Secession comes from the Latin secessio plebis and signifies the ancient Roman ritual of consecration of youth in times of national danger. Before Ver Sacrum, no artistic journal exited in Austria where artists could make their work known to the public. Ver Sacrum also provided a forum for literary contributions from writers such as Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Despite the popular view that the Vienna Secession was only a short-lived revolution, its impact was enormous, not merely on the generation of Expressionists that followed, but also on the future cultural life of the city. The Secessionists aimed at creating a deeper connection with the Viennese public, hoping to affect the traditional aristocratic morality with their innovative works.

The fact that the Austrian state and society represented a solid opposition (which was not the case in Paris and Berlin), gives the Secession movement a revolutionary flair, yet, in many ways, the movement remained within the confines of bourgeois traditions. Viennese artists were not poor immigrant painters, sculptors, and writers, living a free-spirited life and experimenting with new styles. They were middle class citizens, well-established and well-connected in their social sphere, isolated from the rest of Europe, and concerned with making their society better suited for artistic creativity and production. Their work was not simply art for art’s sake (as in Paris), it was art for the sake of social progress – which in itself was a bourgeois ideal – art for the sake of beauty and happiness – art for the sake of life. The idea was very heroic. They built an exhibition hall that resembled a temple; they had the financial support of rich patrons, such as the Wittgenstein family; even the Kaiser attended their first exhibition, giving them the legitimacy of a national institution. At first glance, there was nothing really rebellious about the Secession movement. Until Klimt’s University paintings.

Gustav Klimt began his career as a decorator, gaining fame with his historical and naturalistic mural decorations of the staircases of the Burgtheater and the Art Historical Museum in Vienna. In 1890, Klimt was awarded the Emperor’s Prize for his painting Auditorium of the Old Burgtheater. Throughout the 1890s Klimt painted many allegorical paintings that featured classical Greek motifs, alluding to the ancient civilization as a source of inspiration for the arts. For Klimt (just as for Freud) the archaic culture was a vocabulary, a language, and a bridge to a world beyond every-day reality.

For Klimt, myths provided a whole language of symbols and allusions that he could use to establish communication with the viewer. This was a step away from decorative realist art that had functioned as a pleasing conformation of someone’s social status. By engaging in a conversation with the viewer, by making the viewer think and interpret the symbolical meaning of the images, Klimt was raising public consciousness and provoking debate, which was exactly what the Secessionists believed was lacking inVienna. Increasingly, Klimt (like Freud) began to use classical symbols to serve as a metaphorical bridge to the excavation of the instinctual world of being.

Freud’s discoveries in psychoanalysis played a great role in the development of modern art and literature. The notion of the unconscious as the driving force of human behavior uncovered certain truths that many conservative members of Viennese society were not always comfortable with. Freud’s idea that the instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests created many problems for a culture based on traditional and dynastic order. By analyzing dreams, Freud discovered that the source of all immorality and even “perversion” lies right at the centre of humanity, namely in the unconscious of every human being.

In 1894 the University of Vienna commissioned Klimt to paint three pictures to celebrate the three faculties, Philosophy, Medicine, and Law, reflecting the general theme of “the triumph of light over darkness.” Because of Klimt’s reputation as an allegorical painter at the time, he was given free range in the creative project. The three large paintings were to decorate the ceiling of the University foyer.

Philosophy, the first of the three paintings, was completed in 1900 and exhibited first at the Secession exhibition in Vienna and then at the Paris World Fair where it won the Grand Prix. In Vienna the painting provoked a lot of protest. Klimt was accused of unclarity, chaos, lack of truth, of violating the idea of mastery of nature through science, and of dark obscure symbolism.

The human figures in the painting call to mind T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men, “Shape without form, shade without color, / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;” it portrays anguish, loneliness, despair, vulnerability and powerlessness of people against the vastness and inhumanity of the universe. There is nothing in the portrayal of the human bodies that indicates any agency, independence, or control. They are thrown together but not united; they drift helplessly through different stages of life, becoming more helpless and powerless as they age. There is no greatness, no pride, no celebrating of accomplishment, no comfort due to scientific or industrial achievements, just a sense of temporality. There is no heroic quest, just passive passing. The universe is a gigantic abstraction or void onto which a barely recognizable image of a woman is projected – a dominating feminized void making itself slightly visible but not allowing any certainty. At the bottom of the canvas is another face of a woman, half-veiled, turned away from humanity. If she represents the wisdom, then the love which the title promises is clearly missing. She has an affect on humanity but there is no relationship, no interaction or engagement; if anything, she has brought despair and helplessness, announced mortality instead of affirming life.

In his Philosophy Klimt dismisses all glory of intellectual achievement and breaks through the arrogance of academic aspirations. He seems to be saying, there are no answers, there are not even questions, there is only a cyclical passage of time – people are born and die and their life’s struggles are fundamentally irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. Needless to say, this was not how the faculty members wanted their life’s work to be portrayed.

Medicine was completed the following year and provoked an even bigger scandal. The painting reaffirms the inevitable connection of life and death. The drifting bodies are presented in different stages of aging and symbolize the production of life (man and woman, woman and child, pregnant woman, etc.), but unlike Philosophy it also features skeletons to emphasize the antithesis of life, the failure of health. Klimt seems to be confirming Freud’s notion that human life essentially consists of the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, between the life drive and the drive for destruction. But again there is an absolute lack of agency, particularly in the floating body of the naked woman on the right side of the canvas. She is unconscious, she is naked and helpless, she is beyond the connections with reality and the rest of humanity; perhaps she is beyond help. At the forefront of the canvas stands Hygeia, beautiful and ignorant of the despairing humanity; she has the power of healing but she keeps it to herself – it is what keeps her apart from the rest; without her gift, she would be one of them; she guards it like a priestess guards an oracle; she holds the knowledge of life and death and the antidote to pain but she does not offer it to the people. One can see why the future doctors of Vienna attending the university may have regarded the painting as an attack on the medics at whose mercy is all of humanity. Klimt seems to be presenting them as sorcerers rather than scientists; medicine is but a spell incapable of salvation. People are born to die – what can medicine promise to break that cycle? Perhaps Klimt wanted to remind his viewers that underneath all the prestige and decoration that society provides is the fundamental and inescapable fact of mortality. Perhaps he wanted to break through the facades of hypocrisy and show the helplessness of the naked soul.

The public reaction to the painting was very strong. Klimt was accused of offence against public morals. Eighty-seven faculty members signed a petition in protest of the painting. When Klimt was elected to a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, the Ministry of Culture refused to confirm him. Moreover, the Secession was denied any future state patronage. Klimt’s preoccupation with female sexuality was considered offensive. But one cannot help asking the question, would there have been such a scandal if Klimt did not attempt to align his new creations with the national self image. Klimt’s role as the decorator of public space collided with his aspirations as the painter of innovative psychological imagery. Max Liebermann, the leader of the Berlin Secession wrote in 1904 about painting needing to be “recovered from all considerations of utility,” and that the “value of art is utterly independent of what it depicts or represents.” As it turns out, at the turn of the century this statement could only be true as long as art was presented in independent salons and galleries and sold to independent collectors. In the public sphere, the value of art was directly connected with its function, and the main function of art remained a conformation of the status quo.

Jurisprudence, the last of the three University paintings was completed in 1903. It is the most abstracted and the most dark (stylistically and psychologically) of the three paintings. Again the motifs of powerlessness and vulnerability reappear. It depicts an old, naked man (taken captive by a large octopus) bowing to the three naked female figures, who, as Carl Schorske pointed out, represent the Furies. Above them stand three partially clothed women, holding the book of law and a sword. At their feet is the crowded humanity. Schorske suggested that Klimt was inverting classical symbolism, restoring the Furies to power (who have been deposed in the Oresteia), thereby showing that law has not mastered violence and cruelty, and proclaiming the primacy of darkness. By using myth, Klimt was revealing the power of instinct beneath the political world of law and order. The old man looks tortured and broken, standing before a court of irrational judges, awaiting his punishment. Karl Kraus remarked that Jurisprudence represents a parody of criminal law. The three women on top stand like pillars in a decorative niche; the Furies are portrayed in different poses facing the viewer, indifferent to the old man. They are wrapped in darkness. If they represent justice, and the pillar-women are a mere façade, then the whole picture assumes the image of a dream, or rather a nightmare.

If they are the unconscious, primitive manifestation of order (on top of which rests the current law) then Klimt’s critique of the judicial system is even harsher than of the other two faculties. Yet it is hidden in the symbolism of classical myth. There are no direct allusions as in the previous paintings; the communication with the viewer has been obscured and occurs on a different level, more intuitive and emotional. It is an angry, abrupt communication, marked by anxiety and frustration. Carl Schorske recalled a line from the Aeneid that describes the general feeling of the painting very well, “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (If I cannot bend the higher powers, I shall stir up hell.)

Jurisprudence is perhaps the most personal of Klimt’s paintings. He surely would have identified with the old man who is being judged (and rejected) by the blind, deaf, and the mute. They are judging merely because of the physical fact of their position, without any engagement. They are judging because it is their function. Like the mythical Furies, they are incapable of reason, but merely fulfill their role. As in myth, it takes heroic struggle to change that order.

Klimt’s critique in his University paintings reflects the disappointment of the new generation of aesthetes with the educational system that provided “learning unrelated to life.” As one of the main pillars of Austrian society, education was not on par with the demands of the modernists. There is no historical record of Klimt’s own interpretation of his works; he was reluctant about giving his opinion on his art and believed that the viewer should interpret its meaning.  Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence were shown together at the Klimt collective exhibition at the Secession in 1903. But the escalating scandal and disappointment left their mark on Klimt and forced him to resign the commission in 1904. The paintings were sold to individual owners, the industrialist August Lederer, and the Secession artist Kolo Moser. The last occasion on which the three paintings were seen by the public was at the memorial exhibition held in Vienna in 1943 to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the artist’s birth. During WWII many of Klimt’s paintings had been evacuated to Schloss Immendorf, where in 1945 the retreating SS troops set fire to the castle to prevent it falling into enemy hands. Klimt’s University paintings, along with many other of his masterpieces were lost in the fire.

In the last fifteen years of his life, Klimt perfected his portraiture of women. Some of his best known ornamentally-clad creations were produced after 1908 (as for example The Kiss, Danae, and numerous portraits of high society women). This retreat into decorative painting also marked the end of Klimt’s analytical and allegorical works. The opposition was too strong. The torch of modernism would be again picked up by the next generation of Expressionists, like Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, who would restore the rawness of the unconscious quest and carry it across national boundaries.

Gustav Klimt’s 1902 frieze is based on Richard Wagner’s interpretation of the 9th Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, celebrating humankind’s yearning for happiness. The 34-meter long wall painting shows humanity struggling to overcome hostile forces such as sickness, madness, wantonness, and intemperance, and finally finding eternal bliss in art. The singing angels and the lovers embracing in the final section of the fresco refer to the symphony’s closing choir and Friedrich Schiller’s famous ode To Joy: “This kiss to the whole world!”

The Beethoven Frieze was created for an exhibition in 1902, a collaborative homage to Beethoven by 21 different artists. Klimt’s frieze was originally intended as an ephemeral work of art and it was to be removed after the close of the exhibition. It was only owing to fortunate circumstances, that the frieze was not destroyed as planned: the Secession was to present the following year a major Klimt retrospective (1903), and it was decided to leave the work of art in place.

In 1903 the arts patron and collector Carl Reinighaus purchased the frieze, which was cut into seven pieces to be removed from the wall and was stored for twelve years in a furniture depot in Vienna, until Reinighaus sold the frieze again in 1915 to the industrialist August Lederer. Lederer was one of Klimt’s most important supporters and owner of what was probably the most extensive and important collection of Klimt pictures in private hands at that time.

In 1938 the Lederer family, like so many other families of Jewish origin, was dispossessed. The Beethoven Frieze was thus placed in “state custody” and was only officially returned to the ownership of the family heir Erich Lederer, who had meanwhile settled in Geneva, after the end of World War II. At the same time, an export ban was placed on the frieze, so that Erich Lederer finally decided – not least of all due to the increasingly urgent necessity of restoring the frieze – to sell it to the Republic of Austria.

In 1973 the Beethoven Frieze was purchased by the Republic of Austria and restored over the course of ten years under the direction of Manfred Koller from the Federal Office of Monuments Vienna. Finally, in the course of the general renovation of the Secession in 1985, a room was created in the basement for the Beethoven Frieze. The dimensions of this room exactly correspond to the climatized space required for the frieze for reasons of conservation, and here the frieze can be shown separately from ongoing exhibitions. Since 1986 the wall cycle has again been made permanently accessible to the public at the Secession as a loan from the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.

The three painted walls, beginning at the left-hand side wall, form a cohesive narrative and are described in the catalogue on the exhibition from 1902 as follows: Floating Genii and the yearning for happiness (symbolized by the floating female figures of the first panel).

Suffering humanity (kneeling couple and girl standing behind them): their pleas to the knight in shining armor (the man in golden armor with a sword) as the external driving force, compassion and ambition (the female figures behind the knight) as internal motivation moving him to take up the fight for happiness.

The hostile forces. The giant Typhoeus (the monster with mother-of-pearl eyes extending across the entire front wall with his blue wings and snake-like appendages); his daughters, the three gorgons (the three women standing to the left of Typhoeus). Sickness, madness, death (the mask-like female heads above the gorgon heads). Lasciviousness, wantonness, intemperance (the group of three women to the right of Typhoeus. Intemperance wears a conspicuously ornamented blue skirt with applications of mother-of-pearl, bronze rings, etc.). Gnawing grief (the woman cowering on the right in the picture). The yearnings and desires of humankind fly past them.

The yearning for happiness finds appeasement in poetry (the female figure with the lyre). An empty segment in the frieze follows. This is where broad openings in the wall revealed a view of the Beethoven stature in the 1902 exhibition.

The arts lead us into an ideal realm, the only place where we can find pure joy, pure happiness, pure love (the five women, of which the upper three point to the last scene illustrating Schiller’s Ode to Joy). Choir of angels in paradise. “Joy, thou gleaming spark divine. This kiss to the whole world!” (concluding scene with women’s choir and embracing couple).

The Viennese fashion designer Helmut Lang stopped his fashion career in 2005 to concentrate on his artistic pursuits. His third solo exhibition, entitled “Make it hard” was shown at The Fireplace Project gallery in East Hampton  July 22 – August 8, 2011.

The art project consists of 100 columns made out of shredded clothes from his own fashion archives. 20 years of his own fashion history was re-conceptualized as art. Lang began his fashion career in Vienna in 1978 and presented his first international collection at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1986. His clean lines and cuts shaped the fashion sensibilities of the 1990s. He broke away from the runway show-as-spectacle in the height of the 1980s opulence and was the first to ever stream his collection online, redefining how fashion is communicated.

Already in 2009/2010 Lang donated most of his archives to various museums in New York, London, and Vienna. In February 2010 there was a fire in the building holding his fashion archive, and while sorting through the remains of his former collections, he was intrigued by the ideas of artistic transformation, destruction, and deconstruction.

The shredded materials and fabrics include leather, fur, feathers, plastic, metal (clothes, bags, shoes, watches, belts). Everything from his former collections was shredded in industrial machines and made into raw material again. This of course gives the art project a cyclical and historical dimension it would otherwise not have. Fashion (which is a strong component of culture and art) is thus recycled, first into raw material, and then shaped into pieces of art.

In a way Lang’s art project can be seen as one’s own attempt to impose a new creative order over matter in a world where we are under extreme pressure to exert and exercise our control, and simultaneously are in constant struggle with ourselves for failing to retain control over our lives, our surroundings, possessions, and especially other people.

The cyclicality of the project is also intriguing. We develop increasing awareness of our negative impact on our planet and are still learning to be more wise with our resources. The other level of the cyclical dimension is transformation of one creative medium (in the form of a fashion archive, which tell a history of styles, trends, developments, and cultural curiosities) into another artistic medium, in the form of conceptual art.

Artists, designers, and other creative people at their best observe, visualize, communicate, and mediate certain essential elements of our Zeitgeist. So what does Lang’s transformation and deconstruction of his own fashion archive tell us about our own time and mentality?

Further exhibitions of the columns are planned in London, LA, New York, and Berlin.

This article is also available in German.

In 2004, I moved to Toronto to do an MA in Humanities because of a course entitled “Inventing Modernism: Paris in the 1920s.” I read everything I could get my hands on about Picasso, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Surrealism, Cubism, Ballets Russes, etc, and their lives and work under the roofs of Paris. Together they not only created innovative and revolutionizing art and literature, they created a whole movement, often referred to as aesthetic modernism. I moved to Toronto to study Paris, but I ended up in Berlin.

Woody Allen’s latest film is a lovely homage to, and summary of all the fascinating highlights of Paris in the 1920s. Te film is fill of literary, artistic and cinematic references. All the performances are great, but in his 10 minutes on screen, Adrien Brody, as Salvador Dali, almost steals the whole movie.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” (Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast)

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.” (Zelda Fitzgerald)

“I’m jealous and I’m trusting. It’s cognitive dissonance. F. Scott Fitzgerald talked about it.” (Gil, Midnight in Paris)

“I went out onto the sidewalk and walked down toward the Boulevard St. Michel, passed the tables of the Rotonde, still crowded, looked across the street at the Dome, its tables running out to the edge of the pavement. Some one waved at me from a table, I did not see who it was and went on. I wanted to get home. The Boulevard Montparnasse was deserted. Lavigne’s was closed tight, and they were stacking the tables outside the Closerie des Lilas. (Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926)

“The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain.” (Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast)

“In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. The horse-chestnut trees in theLuxembourggardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work. I got on an S bus and rode down to the Madeleine, standing on the back platform. From the Madeleine I walked along the Boulevard des Capucines to the Opera, and up to my office.” (Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926)

“On the right bank was the Bateau Lavoir, on the left, the smoke-filled evenings of the Closerie des Lilas. Between the two flowed the Seine. And the entire history of modern art.” (Dan Franck, Bohemian Paris – Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art, 2001)

“No. 27 rue de Fleurus. The house had two storeys, and an adjoining workshop. The studio consisted of an enormous room , which contained polished Italian Renaissance furniture, a fireplace, a massive cross hung between two windows, and had whitewashed walls without an inch of bare space left on them. They were completely covered with the works of Gaugin, Delacroix, El Greco, Manet, Braque, Vallotton, Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, and others. It wasn’t a museum. And since, at the time, most of these paintings weren’t worth much, the door to the studio opened easily with a single key: a flat American-style key that could easily be slipped in one’s pocket, a far cry from the enormous, noisy contraptions that Parisians clanked about with in their pockets. This is where the Steins lived. Every Saturday, they received guests in a kind of open house. To be allowed in, all one had to do was answer the hostess’s ritual question – “Who sent you?” – with the name of an artist whose works were in the room. One entered a vast studio where an extremely varied crowd – painters, writers, poets – was gathered. Once a week, at the Steins’, guests could eat and drink all they wanted which, when one was a starving artist, was not a negligible attraction. And if one was also interested in modern art, the company was exceedingly interesting. … Gertrude Stein was the orchestrator of these artistic get-togethers and she enjoyed the role. Seated under her portrait like Saint Louis dispensing his judgment under a tree, she handed out comments with an authoritative air, glaring angrily at anyone who dared to interrupt her.” (Dan Franck, Bohemian Paris – Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art, 2001)

“Nostalgia is denial – denial of the painful present… the name for this denial is golden age thinking – the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in – it’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” (Paul, Midnight in Paris)

“The performance began. No sooner had it commenced when the excitement began. The scene now so well known with its brilliantly colored background now not at all extraordinary, outraged theParisaudience. No sooner did the music begin and the dancing than they began to his. The defenders began to applaud. We could hear nothing, as a matter of fact I never did hear any of the music of the Sacre du Printemps because it was the only time I ever saw it and one literally could not, throughout the whole performance hear the sound of music. The dancing was very fine and that we could see although our attention was constantly distracted by a man in the box next to us flourishing his cane, and finally in a violent altercation with an enthusiast in the box next to him, his cane came down and smashed the opera hat the other had just put on in defiance. It was all incredibly fierce.” (Alice B. Toklas, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)

“All men fear death. It’s a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same. However, when you make love with a truly great woman, one that deserves the utmost respect in this world and one that makes you feel truly powerful, that fear of death completely disappears. Because when you are sharing your body and heart with a great woman the world fades away. You two are the only ones in the entire universe. You conquer what most lesser men have never conquered before, you have conquered a great woman’s heart, the most vulnerable thing she can offer to another. Death no longer lingers in the mind. Fear no longer clouds your heart. Only passion for living, and for loving, become your sole reality. This is no easy task for it takes insurmountable courage. But remember this, for that moment when you are making love with a woman of true greatness you will feel immortal.” (Ernest Hemingway, Midnight in Paris)

It presents Germans as ambitious, regulatory, and hierarchy-loving for no good reason (p.8), as “alternative” because it’s cool to be alternative (p.10), and it mostly generalizes “Germans” into a homogeneous unity, called ”Elitedeutsche” (p.10), who are perhaps best defined as bohemian-bourgeois, Tatort-watching, arugula-eating, gentrification-supporting “Yuppies” (p.278), which in the German context also means former West-Germans, well-off, hipsters, and children of the Wohlstandsgesellschaft parents. Many generalizations and stereotypes are presented sarcastically as the status quo.

The author, who seems to be anglophone, agreed to a Facebook interview, but prefers to stay anonymous:

1. How long have you lived in Berlin?

I have lived here for about 10 years now, with a few breaks in between.

2. What made you want to write about Berlin and its inhabitants?

Disappointment and boredom, mostly. I reckon I was one of those people who believed the hype about Berlin being touted as the “new New York”, and was expecting to come to a vibrant, diverse place full of different cultures, 24/7 entertainment, and plenty of stuff to do. Well, Berlin can be an exciting place for about a month, but then the novelty wears off and you come to the sobering realisation that Berlin is in no aspect living up to the hype around it. It’s infrastructure, culture, and diversity are very typical for a city of 3 or 4 million people, and sure, Berlin does play in that league of cities together with Barcelona, Portland, or Stockholm, but to say it is as diverse and interesting as for example, New York, is a sign that the people who love it here have never experienced a truly big city. Of course, if you’re in your early 20s and come here from Bottrop or Stoke-On-Trent, you might think that you’ve made it to the “Großstadt”.

So, I was disappointed in the reality of daily life in Berlin, but mostly I was disappointed in myself for having been so gullible 10 years ago. Writing “Ich werde ein Berliner” was probably a way to seek catharsis as much as making fun of gullible people – such as my former self.

3. How did you do research for your book?

I didn’t do any conscious research. Yet, once you spent some time with a certain group of people, who all think of themselves as completely individualistic, but are at the same time dressing the same, talking about the same things, going to the same places, and are making the same plans, you can’t help but notice a lot of recurring patterns. After the 25th time you hear someone proclaim “I never watch movies at anonymous multiplexes, but only at small independent movie theatres” as if he or she just made a revolutionary cultural discovery, and what’s worse, people still, in the year 2011, take that as a token of actual individuality, then I have to write about it just to cope with the disgust I feel towards such lazy rebellion.

4. Why did you publish it in German rather than in English?

I didn’t publish the book myself, but was approached by Goldmann Verlag who wanted to put it out on the German market.

5. Who is your target audience?

I haven’t written for a specific audience, but it seems that the exact people who are satirised in my book are the ones who are really getting its intent. On the other hand, people who just casually pick up the book because they’re looking for actual advice on Berlin’s cool spots, feel betrayed and mostly hate it.

6. Why do you prefer to keep your identity hidden?

Mainly to not piss off future employers. I don’t have a private Facebook account, and when I google my name, absolutely nothing turns up, which is great. As I have never written anything before, using my real name would have been the same as using a pseudonym anyway. Nobody would have been any wiser that way.

7. How would you sum up a typical Berliner?

People always say that typical Berliners are brash and very direct, but I’d say that’s not typical for Berliners, but Germans in general. I can’t really tell a Berliner from a German person from, say, Hannover, unless of course they have an accent. I have never been able to spot any typical traits that can’t be found in Germans from elsewhere, too.

8. How would you sum up your definition of “Elitedeutscher”?

Anyone who is content with the lazy achievement to break free from their mainstream upbringing, just to promptly enchain themselves in the even more confining and irrelevant gratification system of occidental counter-culture.

Another blogger and author of a recent Berlin publication is the Austrian Walter Lendl. His Achtung, Freilaufende Berliner: Alles, was Sie wissen müssen, wenn Sie sich in die Hauptstadt wagen (Warning: Free-running Berliners – All that you should know if you’re heading for the capital, Heyne, 2010) is a well-researched impression of the city, as it unfolds itself to someone who likes to observe, read-up, and analyze trends and (hi)stories.

Written in a journalistic style, Lendl also describes the children of the Wohlstand (affluent) parents who move to Berlin to “find themselves” (p.10) and to “actualize themselves” (p.11), because in Berlin everyone can live cheaply and find people with similar interests and needs (p.12). But unlike other Berlin fiction writes, Lendl does not dwell on, or mock the Yuppies, he merely acknowledges their presence as part of the city fabric. While in the past, people used to rebel, he points out, nowadays people simply want to be left alone while they await their inheritance (p.12). And right now there is no better place to do that than Berlin.

Lendl believes that there is no such thing as actual Berliners; instead there are East- and West-Berliner, new Berliners, inhabitants of Charlottenburg, Spandau, etc. Turks, Poles, Russians, Vietnamese, French, and what they all have in common is that in Berlin they can live their lives as they see fit (p.22).

He notes a sense of nostalgia (p.37) for the good old times of anarchy among the aging CDU-voting West-Berliners, and he also notes that nostalgia is more prominent in the West than in the East (p.54).  While protest culture has long been transformed into “pub culture” (p.50), the city has been repopulated by “bourgeois bohemians” (bobos), who may or may not generate what Richard Florida calls the “creative capital” (p.155).

Branded as “poor but sexy” and presented as a narrative of success stories in the marketing campaign “be Berlin” (p.155), the city is fed by the free labour of “generation practicum” (p.158), who populate the start-up businesses of the “creative industries” (p.162), yet all this creativity does not make up for the lack of buyers, investors, and profits, and even the most elaborate fashion trade shows won’t help anybody if nothing is sold there (p.163).

This sober and critical look at the city’s development from an island of rebels, anarchists, and punks, to a capital of Yuppies, project managers, and practicum-labourers, is not new. It is the same mirror that is being held up to Berlin by most journalists, artists, and intellectuals. While it is a very necessary mirror, what hasn’t been written yet is a strategic re-conception of the city’s creative industries, capital investment, and social welfare. Perhaps in many ways, Berlin can learn from Lendl’s hometown Vienna, where the cultural networks generate profits and support their young at the same time.

Yet to conclude on a positive note, Berlin also deserves its credit. Wowereit and his think-tanks and campaign managers are doing their utmost best; they invested into culture, they got the “creative classes” (Yuppies) and their “creative industries” (start-ups) and a whole lot of talent and creativity in-between – the capital will follow (right after the international airport completion). But the question on everyone’s minds seems to be “at what cost”? The term used to express this anxiety in light of looming change is “gentrification” – how does one raise the wages, generate profits, and provide for the young and the old, without sacrificing freedoms and comforts? This is a question for future economists and sociologists. In the meantime, Berlin is caught somewhere between nostalgia and exhilarating progress. And it’s a fascinating journey.

Anna Aichinger is a Viennese designer, who studied at Vienna’s University of Applied Arts, and established her label in 2003. Her designs stand for elegance, quality, femininity, and empowerment. Her clothes are sold at different boutiques in Vienna and presented at Paris Fashion Week twice a year. She believes that “fashion has to highlight the woman” (not vice versa), and that “one should look a woman in the face first, then notice her dress.”

Her customers are women with a strong consciousness for fashion and their own personal style, who appreciate quality fabrics and quality crafts(wo)manship, and who like clothes that have the ability to put them in a certain mood because “when you are dressed well, you can feel better and stronger.” The designer likes to draw out strength from the feminine, and to pair her collections with high heels because “when you’re wearing high heel, you are at eye-level with men.”

The titles of her collections are always very symbolic, poetic, provoking, or empowering. Her 2007 collection was entitled “Vive la Revolution Romantique” and paid homage to international stars and activists like Jane Fonda and Brigitte Bardot. The Inspiration for her Fall/Winter 2010 collection was Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr and their 1930s and 40s classic forms; while the Summer 2011 collection was inspired by Grey Gardens. The current 2011 collection “The Dawn of Dusk” uses the motifs from Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis (1927).

I had the pleasure to meet Anna Aichinger at her atelier in Vienna and talk about her work. Her insights into culture, women, and fashion are just as beautiful, fascinating, and remarkable as her clothes.

1. Your collections are often influenced and inspired by films. How do you see the connection between film and fashion? 

Movies  create a certain mood, atmosphere and attitude in a story. And so does fashion. It should deliver the perfect matching background to the moods and attitude of “your own personal story” called life. Be cinematic!

2. Your Summer 2008 collection was entitled “Alphagirls” – in the North- American context, Alpha-males or females often carry a negative connotation of dominance and power-hunger. How do you interpret the concept? How did you translate it into fashion? 

I think it’s funny that it has a negative connotation in America, where the whole society is based on the values of winning, making money, and being the world’s Number 1. The collection was actually based on women in music, girls in bands. But during my research, I found that there weren’t actually that many female-only bands. Like the Runaways, and Girlschool, where girls, who not only just sing and wiggle their booties, or sing in a band where the instruments are only played by boys, but rather play the instruments themselves. So I started to design for an imaginary all-girls-band called THE ALPHAGIRLS.

I think concerning the term Alpha-male and Alpha-female it is important how someone fills that role. You can be a dominant, bitchy, money-and-self-obsessed pain in the ass, or you can be a leader, a mentor, a networker. I’d rather see the Alphagirl as a women who reaches out into the world, and goes her own way without paying attention to what others might think. Who tries new ways of combining all things she wants to be in life. It’s about escaping the stereotypes we still have in mind today of what a career woman is, what a good wife is, what a good mother is. Alphagirls try to define all of this according to their own needs and desires. And lead their own life. Not following someone else’s ideas.

3. Could you tell me more about the 2010 collection entitled “All we want baby… is everything” – it’s a great title! Do you think it’s possible to have it all? Do you think today’s women can have it all? If yes, how? 

Of course we can. The only problem is that people never take their time to really get into themselves and find out what they really want. They get so many stereotypes of so-called happiness stuffed into their head, all day long from all sides, that they hardly find the time to listen to their inner voice that tells them what they really need in life to be happy. So once you discovered what truly makes you happy, most of the time it’s not that hard to live it.

4. What are some of your favourite films?

There are so many. I really like the old-fashioned classic Hollywood movies like Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Lubitsch, as well as movies made in the golden era of the new Hollywood cinema in the 60s/70s (Scorsese, Coppola, ….). And I like movies where the director is able to create an unique atmosphere such as David Lynch or Wong Kar-Wai. The last movie I really liked was Miral by Julian Schnabel, a beautiful story about the life of three women in Palestine.

5. Who are the women you most admire, who inspire you, who influence you? 

Women who are ahead of their times. Like Hedy Lamarr, an Austrian-American actress who was a major star at MGM in their Golden Age and also co-invented – with the composer George Antheil – an early technique for spread-spectrum communications and frequency hopping , essential to wireless communication from the pre-computer age to present day. I also admire Marlene Dietrich for her engagement in the résistance, generally, women who speak out. Also I’m very inspired by visionaries of any kind.

6. What do you like about Vienna? 

The good coffee.

7. What are some of your favourite places, cafés, shops in Vienna? 

I like das kleine Café very much, as well as the Café Altwien. For the evening I would suggest the for a decent drink while enjoying the beautiful interior designed by Adolf Loos.

8. What kind of images of women do you try to create with your designs? What kinds of words of inspiration would you give to other women?  

I don’t like to prefabricate a stereotype to put the ladies in. I like to build a beautiful strong frame for women ready to be outstanding by themselves. So as closing remarks I would say, courage les filles! You exist only in what you do, and you only live once.

Gabriele Rigby created her fashion label Fröhlich in 2009, and opened her store in Zieglergasse 68, in Vienna’s trendy 7th district in 2010. “Fröhlich” means “happy” in German, and stands for hand-made, original, individual, comfortable, and multi-functional clothes for women. The name also conveys positive, good feeling, and symbolizes “clothes made with love and dedication,” spreading good energy and thoughts.

Gabriele studied at the Höhere Bundeslehranstalt für Mode und Bekleidungstechnik Michelbeuerngasse (HLW9) fashion school, and specialized in professional tailoring and pattern design. She has always been sewing for friends from home, and eventually started presenting her collections at Modepalast and Blickfang fashion trade shows in Vienna.

Her clienteles first consisted solely of her friends, and gradually spread by word of mouth, recommendations, and solid reputation to other Viennese inhabitants of all ages. Her designs range from recycled creations, casual jersey styles, to formal and elegant dresses. She puts great emphasis on quality fabrics and original cutting techniques. Her clothes are made to fit different body types, and are hand-tailored and fitted to suit the individual customer. This personal touch in the old couture tradition is her trademark.

Gabriele is an engaged member of the local Viennese fashion community, in which many of the designers support each other, as well as young photographers, bloggers, models, and other professionals who are just starting out in the industry. She spreads the joyful feeling not only to her customers, but also to the greater community of the Viennese fashion world. Don’t miss the joy!

Cloed Priscilla Baumgartner is the clever and stylish designer behind the eco-friendly label MILCH, and the owner of YPPIG Eco Fashion Showroom at Yppenmarkt, a trendy marketplace in Vienna’s 16th district. MILCH was established in 2000, and symbolizes the recycling cycle of nature (transformation from grass to cow to milk).

Cloed is self-taught and has been sewing from an early age. She always used recycled fabrics and materials, which led her to the unique concept of using old recycled men’s suits, trousers, and dress shirts to create original and funky dresses, blouses, shorts, skirts, and hats. Thus each piece carries a history of the city, and of previous Viennese owners.

Cloed is well-established and very engaged designer in Vienna. In 2003, together with her friend Jasmine Ladenhaufen, she established Modepalast, an annual direct-buy fashion trade show, which has grown from 200 to 3000 square meters of exhibition space for more than 160 established and young designers from Austria, Berlin, and Eastern Europe. Most designers make about 10% of their annual income at Modepalast; it allows many to start their own shops, and many make their first successful sales there.

      Jasmine  and Cloed started out with an “underground mobile boutique,” a mini-mobile pop-up shop that could be set up at trade shows, in museums, on the street, etc. Initially, they had ten participating designer who displayed their collections in the mobile boutique between 2000 and 2003. Modepalast grew out of the mobile boutique as a more permanent, annual event, first held in the Museumsquartier, and now in MAK – Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Applied Arts Museum). Modepalast now has 40 designers who do eco fashion (out of 160, and up from 20 last year).

A unique element about the Vienna fashion scene is the strong sense of community and support network among the local designers, boutique owners, and PR networks. The designers not only support each other, but also help out young designers, photographers, and even bloggers who are just starting out. Cloed plays a key role in this network system: she organizes and manages a listserv where designers can exchange information; she invites young, starting-out designers to sell their clothes in her show room and showcases their work to her clients; she encourages already established designers to switch to organic, recycled, and fair trade fabrics (“to make the world a little better”);  she is very involved in organizational activities, projects, and events to promote local designers, and she is proud of this “alternative” network (not subsidized by the city, but nonetheless successful and useful).

Next time you’re in Vienna, check out Cloed’s boutique (open every Saturday) right next to the organic farmers’ market at Yppenplatz!