THE SPECTACLE OF WEIMAR FASHIONS took place not only on the silver screen, in display windows, on the pages of the illustrated press, and in the numerous fashion shows, but also in the imaginary realm of literature by women writers. In works such as Irmgard Keun's novel Gilgi — eine von uns (Gilgi — One of Us, 1931) and short stories in women's and fashion magazines, we can find some of the most engaging presentations and discussions of fashion as a mirror of women's conflicted experience of modernity. For Weimar women involvement in fashion, very much like involvement in modern life, meant gaining choice and opportunity but losing roots and certainty. This complexity is captured in the ending of Keun's novel: as the eponymous protagonist is leaving her hometown in the aftermath of a failed relationship and an unwanted pregnancy, she is hopeful that in the big city she can become a professional designer in a fashion salon and manage to combine her professional career with a happy family life. Yet she wonders: Isn't her optimism a mere “fantasy”? Is her move “an escape from reality”? Or is it “an escape into a better reality?” Characteristically, Gilgi's questions remain unanswered: both her life and her love affair with fashion have been marked by an oscillation between reality and fantasy, rationality and daydreaming. This last chapter revisits the Weimar experience of fashion and modernity as it is imagined and discussed in the novel Gilgi, a work that foregrounds the New Woman's ambivalent position between prescriptive norms and imaginative practices, between emancipatory potential and constricting reality, between the displays and debates of the time's fashions.

Keun's debut novel is both typical of the literature of the late Weimar period and exceptional in its approach and message. It can be viewed as part of a rising wave of popular novels around 1930 that are all set at the end of the 1920s and with sober language and dry humor tackle the woes and worries of contemporary lower-middle-class office workers (a trend often comprised under the label “Neue Sachlichkeit,” or “New Objectivity”).