EMILIE FLÖGE (1874-1952)
First liberated Viennese woman, Austrian Coco Chanel immortalized in Klimt’s phenomenal Kiss.
(re)ascending the social ladder
Emilie Flöge was born into a Viennese artisan family that had only recently ascended the ladder of social respectability. Her father Hermann was a master turner who had founded a firm that exported Meerschaum pipes, mostly to the British market.
between silk and lace
Always passionate about fashion, Emilie quickly started working as a seamstress, and when her elder sister, Pauline, opened a dressmaking school in Vienna, Emilie willingly agreed to help. Two years later, in 1895, the two of them won a prestigious dressmaking competition.
In 1904 Flöge sisters opened the couture house Schwestern Flöge in Vienna, with interiors designed by Josef Hoffmann. It quickly became a successful enterprise luring wealthy clients committed to modernity in all its forms. At its prime, the company employed nearly 80 workers.
reforming the dress
In addition to heading the Schwestern Flöge, Emilie also maintained a direct, hands-on role in production, often pinning fabric to a dummy (custom-made to a client’s proportions) before directing fabric-cutters to reassemble it. She traveled to Paris twice a year to source fabric, belts and buttons.
But what really fascinated her, was an idea to rethink women’s dress. Using her familiarity with Wiener Werkstätte projects, folk costumes and Japanese textiles, she soon created her very own Reform Dress.
revolutionizing fashion stores
By the time Chanel opened her first salon in Paris, Flöge had been producing cutting-edge designs in Vienna for several years. Her loose, flowing and bold dresses rejected the tight-laced style of historicist Vienna already carving out new roles for women in the industry. Flöge’s fashion celebrated physical freedom, self-expression, closeness to nature, and the vitality of other ethnicities from within the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself to the Far East.
Unlike other retail stores, the Flöge sisters displayed alluring art objects that were not for sale. The store was decorated with beauticians, tortoise shell combs, marbled paper notebooks, silver chalices and hand-carved wooden dolls. Instead of copying popular design trends of the time, Schwestern Flöge was furnished with sleek, adjustable mirrors; geometric, carved wood chairs; and black-and-white chequered tables.
relationship with Klimt
In 1892 Emilie was introduced to Ernst Klimt, who recently got engaged with her sister - Helene. He was a talented painter gaining recognition for his work alongside his younger brother - Gustav. After Ernst’s death in December 1892, Gustav was made Helene's guardian. At that time Emilie was eighteen years old and Gustav became a frequent guest at the home of her parents, spending the summers with the Flöge family at Lake Attersee.
By 1897, Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt had become inseparable, and most Viennese close to the couple assumed that she had in fact become his mistress. While there can be no doubt that the couple were passionately attached emotionally, and would spend countless hours in each other's company over the next two decades, some scholars have raised the possibility that their relationship always remained platonic.
After 1891, Klimt portrayed her in many of his works. Experts believe that his painting The Kiss (1907–08) shows the artist and Emilie Flöge as lovers. Klimt also drew some garments for the Flöge salon in the rational dress style - a style promoted by the feminist movement - and from 1898, other clothes designed by the Vienna Secession.
fin de siècle
By the time Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, many of Schwestern Flöge’s clientele, who were Jewish, had fled the country or were deported to concentration camps. Like neighboring businesses — both established and burgeoning — they were forced to close.
Emilie Flöge never wrote her memoirs, but despite the paucity of sources historians have been able to reconstruct the story of her powerful influence as the muse of one of fin-de-siècle Vienna's greatest artists. Among the last survivors from an utterly vanished world, she died in Vienna on May 26, 1952.
KNOW MORE:
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a12241915/klimt-muse-emilie-floge-forgotten-fashion-designer/
https://www.crfashionbook.com/culture/a22835087/emilie-floge-art-fashion-cr-muse/
https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/floge-emilie-1874-1952