Customer Reviews

Nazi 'Chic'?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Dress, Body, Culture)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For an unusual and insightful look into the Third Reich, I highly recommend this book. The title is a bit of a pun, as the subject material covers the Nazis' unfashionable attempts to maniplate control over female fashions and women's roles through the use of propaganda and manipulation of the fashion industry. The book is well researched, well written, and discloses new findings exposing the purging of Jews from the German fashion industry. The book also details information on the little known German Fashion Institute and the very fashion-conscious Nazi officials' wives and their hypocritical husbands. The book accurately portrays the parody of Nazi political folly, as well as the realism of the devastated German home front through the lives of German women during WWII and the millions of women in the concentration camps throughout Europe. Be forewarned - this is one of those books that once you pick it up, you won't want to put it down until you reach the last page.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the period and/or in fashion. Loved the anecdotes! Fascinating from front to back. The pictures made the book even more enjoyable.

Can't wait to see what else Ms. Guenther writes!

Ok, I must warn you I'm a bit biased - I've had a class with Dr. G. As in class and this book, her knowledge of Weimar and Nazi Germany is amazing. This book has been well-researched with her many trips to Germany and she fluently speaks German - no need to have anyone else translate the documents and interpret for her. She's a great professor, a great author, and a great historian. I recommend this book because it not only covers fashion, but goes into the Nazi system, its hypocrisy, and the devastation on the homefront and in the concentration camps through the lens of fashion. And it is written so EVERYONE can understand and get something out of it! A must-read for anyone interested in Nazi Germany, women's history, and/or fashion!!

This thoroughly engaging, very in-depth survey of the German fashion industry expertly weaves together not just the history of clothing design and manufacture but also the various social, political and economic forces which propelled Germany from WWI through the immediate post-WW2 era. This story particularly provides yet another example of how, despite their domestic-style sabre-rattling to keep both homeland and occupied populations in line, the Nazis again failed to bend popular taste and culture to match their warped political ideology, the principles of which were inconsistently applied and were thus generally unworkable (the cinema is another prime example, as outlined in the text of "Ministry of Illusion").

References to high-profile fashion publications such as Die Dame and Elegante Welt, and the articles and photo features/advertisements which they carried, leave me wanting for more directly from their pages, though such availability is limited to German state museum collections. But, the photos which are thankfully included in this book are alluring and tempting samples of a part of German social history which cries out for a "big picture book."

I have only two relatively minor reasons for not rating this book 5 stars---one, it could do with a little more organization in the form of subject headline breaks within each chapter, just to help summarize as one reads along; and two, more of the book titles, organization names and other items expressed entirely in German could have been translated to give more immediate depth to the material. But I can in no way criticize this work---it is fascinating, comprehensive and entertaining, and I heartily recommend it.

I think the Nazi women were very fashionable. Leni R, Eva B, MAgda G. All were well dressed attractive chic women. Whats with this anti German Bias in EVERYTHING. Im sick of it. Im starting to think that most of these Germanophobes have some other agenda. Like they fear any sort of study of the real purposes and motives of German leaders. Ay compliment is always tempered with..."but oh the holocaust". Give me a break. More than half of American whites are of German ancestry. Our national language narrowly missed being German. All of this anti German stuff started about the same time as the Zionist movemnt started. Like I said..hidden agendas. I like Germans. There Ive said it.