Fashion Writing

This paper seeks to establish the importance of deliberately female perspectives within fashion discourse, exemplified through the diary entries of Helen Grund, a German writer and fashion journalist of the Weimar Republic.

Grund’s original writing on fashion is vivid and particular. I studied the texts in German to fully grasp their content and the unique female voice that stands in sharp contrast to the work of her contemporaries, such as Walter Benjamin. While her work has remained largely unexplored in Anglo-American fashion discourse, it cannot simply be translated and subsequently analysed, because her use of language is so deliberate and integral to her style.

Through a precise process of perpetual translation, coding and analysis, I have determined that Grund’s perhaps most poignant and valuable texts are her diary entries documenting her many travels to Paris between 1924 and 1926. In them, Grund not only presents a uniquely female experience of the time, but offers insights into the lives of women she encounters by taking on the role of a contradictory female flâneur.

Grund reveals ways in which women, mostly at the margins of society, utilised fashion to carve out their own spaces. Even though fashion practice has been written about, critically studied and analysed, women’s experiences in what is arguably a phallocentric industry are often left out of the discourse.

This paper offers fresh insights for a fuller understanding of contemporary fashion performances and proposes ways of writing them that challenge the gap between fashion theory and fashion practices.