"Germany’s Fashion System in the Long Twentieth Century"

In 1902 Werner Sombart in his seminal article “Wirtschaft und Mode” (“Economy and Fashion”, Sombart 1902) showed how Germany’s capital Berlin and the surrounding regions were closely related in a fashion system consisting of design, manufacturing, distribution and consumption (Kawamura 2018). Berlin, the largest city in the world at the time, was a fashion capital and would be certainly one during the roaring twenties, and again during the early twenty-first century. Not only Berlin, however, played a role in the national fashion system. Frankfurt am Main, for example, was also part of this larger national system. In 1959, the textile component of the general consumer fair in Frankfurt had become so large that the management decided to set-up a fair called Interstoff, which would become the most important fashion fabric fair not only in Germany, but also in the world for the next four decades (Wubs and Maillet 2017; Wubs 2018). The market for German textile manufacturers, however, became increasingly competitive in the early 1970s, with newcomers from low-cost countries, particularly in Asia, joining the fray. As a result, the labor-intensive German textile industry increasingly started to outsource its production or, alternatively, went bankrupt (Lindner 2011). The German textile industry, however, did not disappear but moved up the value chain (Hesse 2019). In addition, as a fashion consumption and distribution country West-Germany remained an important national ánd international hub. This paper will address the following questions: First, what were the main characteristic of German fashion system? Second, was the German system organized on a local, regional, national or international level? Third, how did this national system evolve during the long twentieth century? Which institutional conditions in Germany determined the German fashion system?