During the First World War, Germany tried to build an independent fashion industry while imports and foreign cultural influences from France and Britain were politically undesirable and raw materials were increasingly scarce. In 1915, the Magdeburg School of Arts and Crafts opened Germany’s first fashion class in an art school, appointing Else Raydt to lead its women’s clothing workshops. The project was presented as a national industrial mission: by the end of the war, German designers and clothing manufacturers were expected to create a high-quality domestic fashion system capable of competing across Europe. Raydt’s students produced designs for public fashion shows in Magdeburg and Berlin in 1916, while the school’s work was promoted at a Werkbund exhibition in Bern in 1917. Yet Raydt’s own rhetoric exposed the labor contradiction beneath this cultural ambition. She contrasted the well-paid fashion industry of Paris with Berlin, where an 'army of miserably paid home workers' labored to produce garments associated with French fashion. These largely invisible workers—performing clothing production from private homes rather than prestigious studios or exhibition halls—stood at the bottom of the fashion economy that designers and national industrial planners hoped to conquer. The episode illustrates how wartime fashion modernism could celebrate artistic freedom and German industrial independence while relying on poorly compensated, feminized labor whose conditions were rarely visible in elite presentations.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1910s
The Miserably Paid Home Workers Behind Germany’s Wartime Fashion Ambitions
Else Raydt and the Magdeburg School of Arts and Crafts / 1910s
During the First World War, Germany tried to build an independent fashion industry while imports and foreign cultural influences from France and Britain were politically undesirable and raw materials were increasingly scarce. In 1915, the Magdeburg School of Arts and Crafts opened Germany’s first fashion class in an art school, appointing Else Raydt to lead its women’s clothing workshops. The project was presented as a national industrial mission: by the end of the war, German designers and clothing manufacturers were expected to create a high-quality domestic fashion system capable of competing across Europe. Raydt’s students produced designs for public fashion shows in Magdeburg and Berlin in 1916, while the school’s work was promoted at a Werkbund exhibition in Bern in 1917. Yet Raydt’s own rhetoric exposed the labor contradiction beneath this cultural ambition. She contrasted the well-paid fashion industry of Paris with Berlin, where an 'army of miserably paid home workers' labored to produce garments associated with French fashion. These largely invisible workers—performing clothing production from private homes rather than prestigious studios or exhibition halls—stood at the bottom of the fashion economy that designers and national industrial planners hoped to conquer. The episode illustrates how wartime fashion modernism could celebrate artistic freedom and German industrial independence while relying on poorly compensated, feminized labor whose conditions were rarely visible in elite presentations.
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