ABSTRACT
This chapter examines quotations of folkoric dress and type through a temporal lens in the practice of German avant-garde fashion designers Bernhard Willhelm and Jutta Kraus. Specific representations of Black Forest, Bavarian, and Tyrolean folk dress are evaluated within the theoretical framework of contemporaneity and concepts of history. Such reinterpretations make sense of the fractured present, yet are simultaneously situated against time (con-temporary) or are out-of-time. In this sense, Willhelm and Kraus’s designs are out of fashion rather than “in fashion,” temporally suspended between history and contemporaneity. Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben and art historian Terry Smith’s theorizations on the contemporary are analyzed alongside fashion theorist Ulrich Lehmann’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s concepts of Tigersprung (a tiger’s leap) and Jetztzeit (now-time). Heterogeneity, disjunction, and non-linear historical time are concepts manifested through Willhelm and Kraus’s sartorial remembrance of folk dress traditions. As such, their garments articulate a liminal temporal position between fashion and anti-fashion, and against “fashion-time,” uniting past, present, and future.
