Cruel Metonymies: Lilly Reich's Designs for the 1937 World's Fair

Abstract

ion also made many adepts in the world of consumption. Since the 1920s there had been a revolution in the strategies of display. The Art Deco exposition held in Paris in 1925 had a strong effect on the world of commercial exhibitions and installations, but it tended to valorize the unique and the unrepeatable. Even more important was the creation, also in Paris, of the Union des Artistes Modernes in 1929.6 The organization campaigned tirelessly on behalf of a modernist aesthetic, new forms of display, and the use of modern materials consonant with mass production. Bringing together artists, architects, and designers, the Union underscored rather than disguised the relation of the merchandise and the installations with industry, as opposed to the luxury goods exhibited at the Art Deco show that attempted to endow machine-made goods with the allure of handicraft. Influence of new initiatives such as these can be seen in the windows designed for the great Parisian department stores throughout the late 1920s and 1930s: there is no thematic environment, no mimesis, no allegory. Just an abstract composition of fabrics tastefully draped over invisible frames. Having worked for some of Berlin's most fashionable department stores such as Wertheim and Gerson, Reich was familiar with these ideas. In 1911 she designed clothing installations for Wertheim, where her teacher Else Oppler-Legban was head of the women's fashion department.7 During the war, she also collaborated with Hermann Freudenberg, head of Gerson, Berlin's leading clothing store for women, in her aggressive show on German fashion.8 A member of the German Werkbund since 1912, she had closely followed its activities in this area. Working in collaboration with retailers, the Werkbund had initiated a campaign to inculcate modem tenets of window display in order to improve consumer taste. Their 1913 yearbook carried a series of articles and photographs dedicated to the subject, including a display by Reich.9 Shop-windows played an important role in the Werkbund's critique of the commodity and its representation within the retail 6. For the Union des Artiste Modernes, see Les Annees UAM, 1929-1958 (Paris: Union des arts decoratifs, 1988). 7. Magdalena Droste, Lilly Reich: Her Career as an Artist, Reich: Designer and Architect 48. 8. For Reich's work in fashion design, see Mark Wigley's illuminating study White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT, 1995) 149. 9. Die Kunst in Industrie und Handel, Jahrbuch des deutschen Werkbundes (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1913) 103. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.131 on Sat, 15 Oct 2016 04:33:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 164 Cruel Metonymies :?li~i::i~i:. ::_'!W iii';