Text, Textur, Textil. Tragbare Reklame vom TET-Kleid zum paper dress

Abstract

Around 1910, Bahlsen company expanded its classic advertising materials to include simple dresses with decorative ribbons bearing the TET brand name. Shortly afterwards, well-known reform dress ateliers were commissioned to design more elaborate dresses for carnival parades and other events. The wearers thus became walking advertising spaces. In addition to the TET dresses examined here for the first time, the paper dresses of the late 1960s reveal how the marketing of large companies instrumentalized women with the help of fashion. Paper dresses, which as a disposable product represented a vehicle for modern consumer behavior, sold rapidly in the USA. The ‘branding’ of major labels via fashion, still working today, shows how clothing as a means of communication − sometimes more, sometimes less subtly − conveys messages.