100 Years of Beauty: Germany 1910s to 1940s | Research Behind the Looks | Cut

I'm Chris, I'm an anthropologist, I'm working on my PhD at the University of Washington and I did the research for 100 Years Germany. When I started working on this project I wanted to consider how every political regime is also an aesthetic regime. So we think of politics as the domain of economics and policy but it's also the domain of images and the kinds of images that circulate. German beauty reflects aspirations of health, wellness, fitness and hygiene and that reflects I think an endemic anxiety about the turbulence of many political and economic changes that have been happening in Central Europe. The 1910s, we're still in this Art Nouveau moment. When she's wearing the veil it looks a lot like the Virgin Mary. So we're returning to that pure virginal sort of femininity. In the mid to late 20s Berlin is sort of this cultural epicenter and for a moment it is this bright, shining light where cabaret is the center of the world. People are very glamorous and it's not quite like jazz age beauty in other places. So I guess we did a composite of this poster for a cabaret show and a Tamara de Lempicka painting. Her famous painting, Auto Portrait, is of her driving in a car looking very fabulous with her Hermes gloves and stuff like that. We just really loved the expressiveness on her face. So that ended up actually on the cover of this German fashion magazine at the time called Die Dame. Very iconic painting. I have a magnet of it actually at home. Famously in 1933 Hitler and the Nazi party are ascending to supremacy. In 1936 is their kind of big global coming out. They have the Olympics in Berlin so they're hosting it in Nazi Germany and that includes a very public racial rhetoric about the supremacy of the Aryan race. So Hitler hires Leni Riefenstahl, she's recruited to film propaganda using all of the athletes, the German athletes, for their musculature, their athletic prowess, et cetera, et cetera. So we chose a javelin thrower and this is Leni Riefenstahl took the original photo. This is supposed to represent that pure Aryan bloodline that comes from out of the earth in Germany. The pigtails sort of suggest an alpine look. Hitler and Germany are waging a massive campaign in Europe and Africa and this is the moment we will all come to call World War II. War is of course an aesthetic experience. In Vichy France, the subsequent puppet state, there were a number of French fashion houses, very famous ones that we still see on the street today, that actually collaborated with the Nazis. So they helped make uniforms and garments, they processed raw materials and a lot of the wives of the German officers, who were particularly high rank, had access to all of a sudden these very high-end consumer goods coming out of Paris. There is a sense of glamour in very small segments of the German military population. This picture kind of reminds me of the kind of elegance that only a few had access to. Okay, we remember here at home in the United States that when men went off to go fight in World War II, women had to take a lot of the occupational tasks that were now left vacant. So we also see that in Germany.