Wiener Chic – A Locational History of Vienna Fashion (Urban Chic) - Softcover

Ingram, Susan; Reisenleitner, Markus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783201843 ISBN 13: 9781783201846

Publisher: Intellect, 2013

Synopsis

Vienna may not be synonymous with fashion like its metropolitan counterparts Paris and Milan, but it is a fashionable city, one that historically has been structured by changing fashions and fashionable appearances. Like the Litfaßsäule in Orson Welles’s 1949 urban noir masterpiece The Third Man, into which Harry Lime escapes in order to avoid capture and which hapless visitors today presume are merely surfaces for advertising, there are many overlooked aspects of Vienna’s distinct style and attitude. By focusing on fashion, Wiener Chic narrates Vienna’s history through an interpretation of the material dimensions of Viennese cultural life – from architecture to arts festivals to the urban fabric of street chic. The first book that connects Vienna and fashion with urban theory, Wiener Chic draws on material that is virtually unknown in an English-language context to give readers an insider’s vantage point on an under-appreciated European fashion capital.

About this title

About the Author

 Susan Ingram is associate professor of humanities at York University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Wiener Chic

A Location History of Vienna Fashion

By Susan Ingram, Markus Reisenleitner

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-184-6

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Preface, 
Introduction: Vienna's Culture of Appearance, 
Part I: Chic Formations: The Cinematically Historical Underpinnings of Vienna's Urban Imaginary, 
Chapter 1: Baroque Chic: Fashioning Courtly Spaces, 
Chapter 2: Ringstrasse Chic: Vienna Moderns, 
Chapter 3: Prolo Chic, 
Chapter 4: ITL[Ausländer]ITL Chic, 
Part II: Staging Fashion in Vienna, 
Chapter 5: Museum Chic, 
Chapter 6: Designer Chic, 
Conclusion: Vienna Now, Not Never, 
References, 
Filmography, 

CHAPTER 1

Baroque Chic: Fashioning Courtly Spaces

The Habsburgs come to town: Establishing Vienna's baroque imaginary

"When I walk along the Ring I always get the feeling that a modern Potemkin has wanted to create, in the visitor to Vienna, the impression of a city exclusively inhabited by nobles."

(Adolf Loos, cited in Stewart 78)

Vienna's global imaginary might be shaped by the imperial grandeur that is part of its baroque legacy, but Vienna was not always a court city. Nor has it ever been a court city like any other. As the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, it hosted, for several centuries, the largest court in the European realm (Kauffmann 31), and that court determined the city's character more intensively and for a longer period of time than is true of other European court cities, whether London, Paris, St. Petersburg, or Madrid; only in the Istanbul of the Ottomans do we find something of comparable length and impact. The Habsburg legacy in Vienna is complex and motivates our decision to translate the designation Residenzstadt as court city rather than imperial city. The Driver and Gilbert edited collection Imperial Cities, which explores "the role of imperialism in the cultural history of the modern European metropolis" (Driver and Gilbert 3), is indicative of the tendency in contemporary, especially postcolonial, scholarship to focus on the colonial empires of the modern period rather than their ancient, medieval or early modern predecessors. Vienna's Habsburg heritage seamlessly bridges the city's pre-modern and modern pasts and requires a designation that sidesteps the danger of reducing that heritage to its baroque glory. One can see this tendency to blend the pre-modern and modern in the exhibition that Diana Vreeland spearheaded at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 1979 to August 1980 on "Fashions of the Hapsburg [sic] Era: Austria-Hungary." The catalogue of the exhibition opens with an essay by Joseph Wechsberg on the "Glory of Vienna" that, in turn, opens with "[t]he oldest known relic, a small figure of a woman, known as 'Venus of Willendorf' [that] was found northwest of Vienna [... and] is believed to date from the Old Stone Age, from about 20,000 BC [sic]" (Cone 21). Wechsberg proceeds to rattle off the city's accomplishments but soon finds himself caught up in the city's legendary taste culture. Vienna's past becomes a blur of music and bonhomie à la Musner: "Even in those days the Viennese liked music and celebrations. The city became known as a place for good living. Many nobles 'stayed much longer than their affairs demanded.' Same as today" (21). The days in question refer to Ottokar II's occupation of the city in the thirteenth century, but one sees how easily the city's courtly traditions can be dehistoricized and used to reduce past and present to a dreamlike fantasy of the splendiferous style that has come to be associated with the Habsburgs.

Although Vienna was first settled by the Celts in 500 BCE and called "Vindobona" by the Romans, for whom the Danube served as the northeastern border of their empire, it was not until the late Middle Ages that Vienna began to acquire the accoutrements that later became determinative for its urban mythology (ibid.). During the Early and High Middle Ages the predecessors of the Habsburgs as Austrian rulers, the Babenberg family, held itinerant courts, as was customary for the period, with Vienna being just one among other, equally important, central places of residence such as Innsbruck and Wiener Neustadt. Only in the late Middle Ages under the newly established dynasty of the Habsburgs did Vienna emerge as the most important city in this territory. The power vacuum created when the last Babenberger, the appositely named Friedrich der Streitbare (the Quarrelsome) who fell in battle with the Hungarians in 1246, was filled first by Ottokar II of Bohemia and then challenged by Rudolph I of Habsburg. Ottokar is credited with rebuilding the city after it was devastated twice by fire and with moving the court from Am Hof to the Hofburg (Lehne and Johnson 15), while Rudolph, who deposed him after a five-week siege in 1276, established what ended up being over 600 years of more or less uninterrupted Habsburg presence in the city, something that got off to a rather rocky start with further destructive fires and bouts of the Black Death. The rivalry that developed in the second half of the fourteenth century between the archduke Rudolph IV, who was withheld the honour of becoming an Elector in the Holy Roman Empire, and his father-in-law in Prague, the Wittelsbacher Holy Roman Emperor Karl IV, and the concomitant vying for prestige of the two powerful dynasties, left its impact on Vienna's urban fabric in the form of the Stephansdom and the founding of the university, the "Alma Mater Rudolphina 1365" (Vocelka 2001, 14), offsetting Prague's hegemonic status as a centre. Subsequently, the practice of the Habsburgs dividing their lands among their heirs led to political turmoil, factionalism, and a generally confusing situation during the late Middle Ages, with Graz and Innsbruck competing with Vienna as residences of branches of the Habsburgs, and the citizens of Vienna demonstrating their independence and political weight. This situation did not altogether change with the unification of the lands under Maximilian I (1493–1519), for whom Vienna was again just one among other places of residence, with Innsbruck his favourite. By 1510, all Vienna had become was the permanent place of assembly of the diets of what is now Lower Austria (Vocelka 2001, 15).

The situation changed when the Bohemian Crown and a smaller part of the Hungarian lands fell to the Habsburgs through the death of Louis Jagiello in 1526 at the important Battle of Mohács, which in many respects was far more influential for future Central European developments than the (vastly overrated) Peace of Westphalia of 1648. Maximilian's successor Ferdinand I (1522–64) became the ruler over a multinational empire (in 1556 he was also elected emperor of the Reich, establishing a tradition that would last until 1806), with centralized institutions and a constantly increasing imperial household and opportunities for the nobility to gain status and wealth by "being around." Vienna was the logical choice as court centre for Ferdinand, and during the sixteenth century the central agencies of the Austrian lands as well as the Reich were moved there. Ferdinand had already broken any political resistance on the part of Vienna's citizenry in 1522 (the Blutgericht – bloody court), and, after the successful defence against an Ottoman siege in 1529, he set up the Habsburg court there in 1533 and began fortifying the inner city with bastions to replace the heavily damaged medieval walls that Suleiman the Magnificent and his troops had left behind, the expense of which contributed to the paucity of Renaissance architecture in Vienna (Lehne and Johnson 27). The lasting threat from the Ottomans, firmly established in the greater part of Hungary, with constant border skirmishes interrupted by a few full-fledged wars, greatly damaged the reputation of Vienna and made Prague an obvious and much less dangerous alternative. In 1583, Rudolf II (1576–1612) moved the court to Prague, and Vienna was reduced to a fairly provincial status for the next decades.

It was only after the defeat of the Bohemian estates in the battle of White Mountain in 1620 that the importance of Prague was curtailed and Vienna became the undisputed court centre of the Habsburg Empire. The ultra-catholic Ferdinand II (1578–1637) permanently moved his court to Vienna, a city that had turned to Protestantism at the outset of the Thirty Years War. Spearheading the Counter-Reformation, Ferdinand II, together with supporters such as the Viennese Mayor Daniel Moser and Bishop Melchior Khlesl, forced upon the city a "monastery offensive," which visibly changed the city's complexion: "between 1603 and 1638 13 Catholic orders competed in an ecclesiastical building boom of monasteries and churches [... in a] style of triumphant Catholicism which turned churches into palaces: Baroque" (Lehne and Johnson 29). By the time the Ottomans returned for their second siege of the city in 1683, and were again sent packing, this time with the help of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the much improved city fortifications, the Habsburgs had given up their residences in Prague and Graz, made Vienna their own and started a breathless land-grab of territories previously held by the sultan, while the Ottoman Empire started its rapid decline. With the centralization of power around court centres that is characteristic of the early modern period, where royal power was consolidated by creating a centralized bureaucracy, a hierarchical state apparatus, and processes of decision-making that required nobility to be in the vicinity of the emperor, the Habsburgs permeated Viennese society with the pomp and theatricality of their absolutist courtly presence. The consequent establishment of the Habsburg Empire as a major European power in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was mirrored in the splendour and size of the Habsburg court in Vienna, which now became renowned for its festivities, cultural activities, and court ceremonial, and grew from a size of about 500 under Ferdinand I to well over 2000 under Karl VI (1711–40).

Vienna then underwent a baroque building boom that led to dramatic growth and a change in the inner city's fabric and also that of its surroundings. Architects Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, his son Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach and Lukas von Hildebrandt led the way in erecting palaces around the Habsburg's Hofburg as well as aristocratic summer residences beyond the city's gates, beginning with one for the Habsburgs at Schönbrunn [Figure 1.1], while a preliminary form of public sphere in the form of a lively coffeehouse culture – in later periods one of the signature images of the city – began to flourish [Figure 1.2].

Despite being born out of the Habsburgs' suppression of Vienna's civic independence and Protestant leanings and being imposed on Vienna by an autocratic dynasty and its noble elites (which during and after the Counter-Reformation were frequently recruited from other parts of Europe), the churches and palaces as well as the pomp and pageantry of the court provided Vienna's central districts with an enduring baroque legacy in its historical architecture that a majority of the city's inhabitants still cares strongly about and has fought hard to maintain, as Musner reveals in detailing contemporary struggles over the development at the Südbahnhof and the failed attempt to build a reading tower during the redesigning of the Museumsquartier (Musner 59–64). In both instances baroque elements in the city's image were seen to be threatened by the "modernity" of contemporary architects' signature projects, offending additions were denied, and the architects reprimanded that the "historical substance" not be damaged by the rebuilding (62). Unlike the shiny reconstructed Haas Haus across from the Stephansdom, which opened in 1990 [Figure 1.3], not to mention the modernist green marble facade of the Loos Haus across from the Hofburg on the Michaelerplatz [Figure 1.4], both of which were allowed to proceed despite the controversy they created, the Museumsquartier and Südbahnhof developments were judged to be too visible and the proposed changes too radical a departure from the view of the city from the Upper Belevedere made canonical by a veduta Bernardo Bellotto painted for Maria Theresia in 1759 or 1760 (65). For the powers-that-be who decided on the final look of the Südbahnhof and Museumsquartier projects, it was vital that Vienna be associated specifically with the baroque. It was that particular component of its history, and that particular panorama [Figure 1.5] which was seen to be of value for Vienna's image – and not the "Alt-Wien" of Biedermeier nostalgia.

One cannot know what role, if any, a film by an independent American film-maker played in this decision-making; however, as we show next, Before Sunrise did much to establish Vienna as a European capital of romance in the global cinematic imaginary by associating it with baroque tropes that carried on into modernist art and on into the present, tingeing that present with courtly grandeur and an awareness of life's fleetingness.

After the Wall is before ... the Enlightenment: Linklater's refashioning of Vienna's baroque imaginary

"If you wish it, it is no fairy tale [...] If you don't wish it, it is a fairy tale and will remain one" (Herzl, cited in Schorske 164).

In 1995, Richard Linklater won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale for his third feature-length film, Before Sunrise, which tells the story of two twenty-somethings – the male American (played by Ethan Hawke) and the female French (played by Julie Delpy) – who meet on a train headed from Budapest to Paris and spontaneously decide to disembark in Vienna and spend the day and night together. The film's thematics were already set, as were the types of characters that would wander through the city talking and falling in love, before Vienna was chosen as the film's location. While Weixlgartner and Zeilmann would have us believe that a screening of Dazed and Confused at the Viennale occasioned Linklater's decision to set Before Sunrise in Vienna, according to the Viennale archives, the film was never screened there. Whatever the circumstances of Linklater's first encounter with Vienna, what is of interest here is his intuition that the city was the ideal place to set and shoot this film. Critics have commented on Linklater's "very exact sense of history, in terms of both [his] own personal place in it and observing things culturally with a high degree of accuracy" (B. Thompson 21); as will be shown here, that sense carried over to aesthetics. Examination of the paintings, music and literature Linklater chose to include in Before Sunrise reveals a fascination with the baroque echoes in modernity that result in a uniquely historical recoding of the neo-baroque.

Linklater's sensitivity to the influence of environment on aesthetics is demonstrated unequivocally in one of the scenes in Before Sunrise. After Céline has her palm read at the Kleines Café and has been told by the fortune-teller that she is on her way to becoming the kind of strong and creative woman she admires, she and Jesse wander past a poster for an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Wien and, unexpectedly, it is not of Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele or any of the other painters that are usually associated with Vienna but rather, as noted in the Introduction, one of the French neo-impressionist painter Georges Seurat. Standing in front of the poster, Céline recounts having seen this early drawing, entitled La Voie Ferrée (Railway Tracks, 1881–82), in a museum and having been so transfixed by it that she must have spent at least 45 minutes in front of it; in other words, it made time stop for her, at least temporarily. What she particularly loves about Seurat's paintings, she tells Jesse, is the way "the people seem to be dissolving into the background [...] It's like the environments are stronger than the people." She is attracted to Seurat's human figures, she tells Jesse, because they "are always so transitory," and she stops to check that she has the right word in English, drawing the audience's attention to it.

This exhibition, it turns out, never took place. In fact, according to the archive of its exhibitions available online, it seems that there has never been a Seurat exhibition at the Kunsthaus Wien, which opened on 9 April 1991. Moreover, when Before Sunrise was being filmed in Vienna in the summer of 1994, what was showing at the Kunsthaus was an exhibition of works by the American sculptor John De Andrea. Why would Linklater substitute early Seurat drawings for the De Andrea exhibition that was actually on? De Andrea is known for his hyperreal depictions of female nudes and for the controversy that the exhibition of one of his photos at Documenta V in Kassel in 1972 caused. One of the curators of the "Hyper Real" exhibition at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen in 2011, which included a controversial De Andrea sculpture, sums up the point of the pieces as follows:

The exhibit at Documenta, which depicted a couple that had obviously just finished having intercourse, caused considerable consternation. The meaning of this work actually is not to be found in its provocation as such or in its unveiled representation of sexuality, but in the obvious and equally outspoken human problems of the couple. The work induces feelings of misfortune, misery and pity.

This alienation between the lovers and their incurable misfortune becomes even clearer with the work shown in Aachen. The man is not only fully dressed and the woman naked, but she clings to him, while he touches her only minimally, in order to not induce an open rejection.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Wiener Chic by Susan Ingram, Markus Reisenleitner. Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783201843
• ISBN 13: 9781783201846
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200