Modern Confections: Jews, New Women, and the Business of Fashion in Imperial Berlin

Abstract

This article analyzes a series of visually arresting albums by the Jewish-owned Berlin department store and clothing manufacturer Kaufhaus N. Israel, published between 1899 and 1914. The company wooed and shocked bourgeois audiences by photographically illustrating the gender norm-defying activities of early twentieth-century “new women”—over a decade before the equivalent German term became commonplace. The N. Israel albums relied on readers’ extrapolation from their pages to the Israel company brand and the fashionable inventory of its store. The article demonstrates how an innovative device to craft the image of a Jewish clothing company also incorporated tacit ideas about Jewishness. Along the way, these visions traveled through the prism of female figures, establishing connections between Jewishness, fashionability, and modernity—the “fashionable” Jewish feminist, a reformer of Imperial German society, and the “fashionable” “Oriental” Jew, a style icon and imitable “cross-dresser.” The article examines the albums’ visual and verbal components as part of a larger design, isolating the voice of the department store. The Israels used their albums, the article argues, to style their store as a “women’s paradise,” simultaneously, however, confecting their own public identities as liberal allies of the feminist cause and creators of modern German culture.