Next to Charlotte Wolff on Walter Benjamin’s diagram of friendship is the name ‘Frau Hessel’, known as Helen Grund in her work as a fashion journalist. Born on 30 April 1886, today would have been Grund’s 135th birthday.
Charlotte Wolff’s book Studies in Hand Reading (1936) begins with a number of cases of a number of types: there’s the hand of a politician, a domestic servant, an acrobat, among others. Eventually these types shift to personal names and one of the first is Helen Grund. Of her hand, Wolff notes the oval shape of the palm and a vegetative rhythm of her temperament.
Wolff became acquainted with Helen Grund and her husband Franz Hessel in the early 1920s. They had, she says in her memoir, ‘replaced the Benjamins – in a fashion’ as figures of influence and inspiration. Franz Hessel was a writer and co-translator of Proust with Benjamin, and Casanova with another occupant of the diagram, Ignaz Ježower.
Wolff says that Franz Hessel lived in a monk-like cell, as if in a shell. Nothing more than a bed, a table, a chair. Grund’s apartment, on the contrary, was opulent, with thick carpets and lounge chairs. Such opulence was carried into her look and demeanour: she walked with an ivory-topped cane and struck a boyish resemblance, according to Wolff, to Frederick the Great.
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Following Wolff’s (near) arrest in Berlin in 1933, she boarded a train to Paris and, once there, took a taxi to the Panthéon. From there she telephoned Helen Grund, who welcomed her and put her up in a nearby pension until they looked for an apartment together, which they eventually found by the Porte d'Orléans.
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From Paris, Wolff could no longer practice as a doctor, as she had in Neukölln, and so took up hand-reading as a means of survival. Grund introduced Wolff to her literary and artistic circles, from where she found subjects for hand analysis. They included a series of photographers, that were later published in Studies in Hand Reading: Man Ray (roll an eight), Horst (roll a sixteen) and George Hoyningen-Huene (roll an eleven).
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Philipp Ekhardt’s recently published book Benjamin on Fashion (2020), draws on Grund’s influence on Benjamin’s work on fashion: on the concept of elegance, on the historical development of various silhouettes, on the synthetic, among other things. (Much of this influence made it into convolute B of the Arcades Project, which you can hear Esther Leslie read here, for example:
The designer Madeleine Vionnet features a number of times in Ekhardt’s study, including for these photographs shot for Vogue by George Hoyningen-Huene in 1931:
Vionnet also appears for her attempts to ‘institute intellectual and artistic property rights for designers’ and fight ‘lawsuits against unauthorised replicas’. Garment replication was long part of the industry of fashion. For example, in her memoir Fashion is Spinach (1938) the designer and trade unionist Elizabeth Hawes chronicles her employment at a copy house in the 1920s. She would be sent to runways in relative disguise to sketch the pieces on display. She would then return the sketches to the copy house as quickly as she could, so copies could be made and brought to market.
Vionnet employed a number of strategies to deal with these copy houses. One, as Ekhardt documents, ‘instituted photographic documentations of her creations against mirrored corners in which the full three-dimensional extension of the dress and its make would be prismatically broken down and folded onto a single picture plane, the so-called copyright shot’:
The photographic shot had a precedent: Vionnet had used label, sewn into the garments, which included her signature and her fingerprint (!) ‘in order to indelibly mark a vestment’s origin in her house’:
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One wonders what a label would look like if the total division of labour was accounted for on it? What would Charlotte Wolff have said if she had not only read Madeleine Vionnet’s hand print, but had read the garment, marked, as it is, by the hands of everyone who produced it? Might one be able to replicate someone’s fingerprints, not just to copy a dress pattern but to inhabit a new life, a new opulence?
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Coda: In 1977, Wolff returned to Berlin, invited by a lesbian activist group called L.74, which published a magazine U.K.Z. (Unsere Kleine Zeitung). She was met at Tegel by Ilse Kokula, who took her to Mariannenstraße 34 in Kreuzberg where the L.74 was based. In the flat was an old woman who had lived in a disused railway carriage in a forest during the war, in hiding as she was a communist. Wolff visits the East, drinks Bulgarian wine, and returns to the West in the evening. She stumbles across the the elevated railway in Schöneberg and recalled the ‘homo-bar’ underneath it, where she ‘had enjoyed the wild dancing of same-sexed couples’ in the company of Helen and Franz Hessel. Alles Gute !