Jul 13, 2020
At one point, Walter Benjamin and Helen Grund planned to travel together through Brandenburg by car (with her driving), collaborating on a series of pieces for the Frankfurter Zeitung. The plan was never realized.
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At one point, Walter Benjamin and Helen Grund planned to travel together through Brandenburg by car (with her driving), collaborating on a series of pieces for the Frankfurter Zeitung. The plan was never realized.
On the link between Charlotte Wolff and Helen Grund: fingerprints as signatures or ledgers. Madeleine Vionnet “devised a label that was sewn into her designs, which included both replicas of her signature and her fingerprint, in order to indelibly mark a vestment’s origin in her [fashion] house, and went on a publicity offensive, taking out ads in fashion publications that were intended to educate potential customers that the original products of her maison could not be purchased through subsidiaries (“Madame Vionnet ne vend ni aux commissaires, ni aux couturières”)” (from Philipp Ekardt's new book Benjamin on Fashion, 2020)
On cars and speed and friendship (from Mila Ganeva, Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933)
Last year I went to look at this book at the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin. The text is wrapped in a reflective silver cover with this bright peacock feather trailing downwards. It was published as a short run by Munich’s Meisterschule für Mode in 1935 and informs much of Benjamin’s thinking in the Passagenwerk (1927-40)
Helen Hessel (on the diagram as “Frau Hessel”, but also often known as Helen Grund) photographed in Paris around 1929