Verwandlungen (Transformations) / Simplicity in fashion too (Einfachheit auch der Mode)

Research Background Fashion journalism as a literary style, at once ephemeral in its passing concerns yet attentive to wider historical and cultural realities, emerges in the early decades of the twentieth century in Europe, particularly in Paris, influenced by both the advice columns of women's magazines and the Modernist experiments of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. From this new writing arises the possibility of a later fashion theory that would be relatively independent of its origins in sociology and anthropology. The sources of this emergence, however, are little documented in English. Research Contribution The first translation of two newspaper articles written in Paris by Helen Hessel for publication in Berlin in 1931/32 is a brief document of this moment. Hessel's writing has the lightness that we associate with the treatment of what was traditionally a superficially feminine subject matter, yet it also reflects, responds to, and perhaps anticipates the social, political, and economic actuality of the 1930s: post-Depression middle-class impoverishment and resourcefulness, the still-subordinate socio-economic status of women but also their struggle to stake out spheres of independence, and tentative recognition of the irrecuperable passing of an age. Research Significance Hessel influenced and was cited in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, his writings on post-nineteenth century Parisian city life, and these are the first translations of articles by Hessel collected in Ich schreibe aus Paris. Über die Mode, das Leben und die Liebe published in 2014. Their publication accompanies an interview with the editor of the collection, Mila Ganeva. The publication Mode and Mode is itself a return of contemporary writing on fashion theory and practice from the format of the academic journal to that of the periodical.