Overview

This is the first book in English to deal comprehensively with German fashion from World War I through to the end of the Third Reich. It explores the failed attempt by the Nazi state to construct a female image that would mirror official gender policies, inculcate feelings of national pride, promote a German victory on the fashion runways of Europe and support a Nazi-controlled European fashion industry. Not only was fashion one of the countrys largest industries throughout the interwar period, but German women ranked among the most elegantly dressed in all of Europe. While exploding the cultural stereotype of the German woman as either a Brunhilde in uniform or a chubby farmers wife, the author reveals the often heated debates surrounding the issue of female image and clothing, as well as the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between official Nazi propaganda and the reality of womens daily lives during this crucial period in German history. Because Hitler never took a firm public stance on fashion, an investigation of fashion policy reveals ambivalent posturing, competing factions and conflicting laws in what was clearly not a monolithic National Socialist state. Drawing on previously neglected primary sources, Guenther unearths new material to detail the inner workings of a government-supported fashion institute and an organization established to help aryanize the German fashion world.How did the few with power maintain style and elegance? How did the majority experience the increased standardization of clothing characteristic of the Nazi years? How did women deal with the severe clothing restrictions brought about by Nazi policies and the exigencies of war? These questions and many others, including the role of anti-Semitism, aryanization and the hypocrisy of Nazi policies, are all thoroughly examined in this pathbreaking book.

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9781859737170

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Winner, Millia Davenport Award 2005, Costume Society of America Winner, Sierra Book Prize 2005, Western Association of Women Historians This well-researched book is a fascinating and very readable account of the role of fashion and clothing in the National Socialists' construction of German womanhood and national identity during the Third Reich. Costume, Edwina Ehrman A mavellous example of how the seemingly peripheral or mundane can shed light on the contradictions and tensions of the worst kind of totalitarian regime. BBC History Magazine Well-written, engrossing and exhaustive study, Guenther furnishes ample evidence of the Nazis' peculiar preoccupation with fashion. By exploring this previously unstudied realm of a much-studied era, Nazi Chic? provides an original and absorbing glimps into the absurdity and exactitude of the National Socialist enterprise. Forward, Amanda Fortini Makes powerfully apparent how fashion was often of greater concern to ordinary Germans (and to their leaders) than the trajectory of high politics. The American Historical Review, Dagmar Herzog Nazi Chic? is a remarkable and welcome document, a careful look at familiar terrain from a fresh perspective. London Review of Books, Anne Hollander THis book is an enlightening and important piece of research into a subject which is not frequently given academic treatment. Debattle, Steve Plumb Well-researched, richly detailed, and thought-provoking study shows how fashion illuminates crucial issues in the history of the Third Reich. Central European History It is a book for historians as much as for students of fashion and design, chic without the kitsch. David Cesarani

Author Information

Irene Guenther is Instructional Professor of 20th-century European and American History at The Honors College, University of Houston, USA and recipient of the University of Houston’s Provost Teaching Excellence Award and The Honors College Student Board’s Distinguished Teaching Award. She is also the author of Postcards from the Trenches: A German Soldier’s Testimony of the Great War.

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