3. The Power of Difference - Andrea Kollnitz

Europe and Fashion: Questioning Identities and Cultures. EFHA Conference 2018

Looking at representations of fashion in cultural magazines and satirical images from Germany, Great Britain and Sweden during World War I, this paper aims to discuss the crucial role of visual fashion discourse in creating and consolidating difference and power relations in political and national as well as class- and gender-based identities. The aim is to highlight fashion as expressive dramatizing and clearly differentiating costume for different (satirical) characters on different national and international stages and problematize the impact of visual stereotypes based on strategic contrasts in clothing and body-types in political discourse during wartime. Comparisons between depictions of fashion and dress in the war-faring nations of Germany and Britain and the neutral zone of Sweden, show significant variations in the discursive function of fashion as on one hand emphasizing and triggering political, racial and ethnic antagonisms between the nations and on the other negotiating national power struggles between the classes and sexes in societies dealing with the terrors of war while at the same time handling the rise of modernity. The presentation will synthesize studies on British Punchand its staging of a national theatre of the classes with distinctively dressed characters during the early years of the war, German Simplicissimusand its agitating visual stereotypes and caricatures of enemy nations, and Swedish Strix,where visual fashion representation mainly served a national war between the sexes under the challenge of modern women in Paris fashion destabilizing traditional national values.