„Sie formen am Stil unserer Zeit“. Die Hamburger Meisterschule für Mode in den 1950/60er Jahren

Abstract

Materials from the Armgartstraße University Archive, which since 2009 has been dedicated to the documentation and historical research of textile and fashion training in Hamburg, form the starting point for a ‘search for traces’ of the history of the Master School of Fashion (Meisterschule für Mode), a predecessor institution of today’s Department of Design at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Specific examples are used to analyse local, regional and international working methods and structures of vocational training in the textile and clothing sector in the Hanseatic city. At the centre of the article is the micro-historical research of an ambitious fashion project fromthe 1950s and 1960s, a time when the school’s highly successful work reflected fashionable and social developments in the still young Federal Republic of Germany. The selected example clearly shows to what extent the teaching and training programme primarily addressed young women and thus pursued emancipatory objectives. This study should therefore also be seen as contribution to feminist-orientated history of design in Germany.