The fifth issue of the magazine Mode and Mode in 2018 published translations of two articles that Helen Hessel wrote for Für die Frau, the monthly magazine supplement the Frankfurter Zeitung for women.
The first article is entitled ‘Transformations’, from May 1931. She argues for an understanding of fashion in relation to sex, whereby “woman” occupies a number of roles to capture the “naturally-conditioned polygamy of men”. She can perform different identities, dress up differently, use perfume and fans and hair dyes to transform herself. She dresses to express the bustle of her busy days, but she too can become adaptable: exchanging items of clothes to move through those days. Transformations can be so rapid and radical that the ‘fregoli’ delusion sets in – whereby a person holds the belief that different people are in fact a single person. (Consider this in relation to Hessel’s own polygamy; perhaps the thesis is that fashion replaces sexuality, a sexuality that would otherwise be less constrained and limited)
The second article is entitled ‘Simplicity in fashion too’, from February 1932. Here Hessel argues for a relation between fashion and world events (what we might understand as “history”). Again, she emphasises transformability. Like the modern interior, garments should reflect the time of the day, the occasion, the mood. She argues that the ‘silhouette’ has stabilised, given it reflects more-so now the form of the body. Woman can escape the “dictatorship of the fashion houses” by dressing according to her and her body’s will and spontaneity. But Hessel doesn’t seem to hold tight to this possibility, calling the ways in which a woman’s suit can be adapted and transformed “one of the magic philtres with which fashion works its spell”