Style Icon: Emilie Flöge and Wiener Werkstätte

The most I ever spent on a piece of clothing was $130 (including shipping from China) for my wedding dress. My second most expensive clothing is a vintage kaftan by a vintage designer I like called B. Cohen Originals. It's actually a giant square that looks like it was painted by a 4 year old, but it really struck me. I am too cheap to collect canvas artwork yet, but some of my clothes feel like artwork to me. 

That kaftan reminds me a bit of Emilie Floge and Gustav Klimt's work, of which I am a huge fan. Klimt is of course famous for his painting "The Kiss" and others, but Emilie is less known today. She was his lifelong friend, lover, muse, and colleague to Klimt, and a well known fashion designer in Vienna at the time (early 1900s). The 1910s is my favorite era in fashion apart from the late 60s. Oddly enough, 2018 is 100 years since Gustav Klimt's death and 50 years since my favorite year in fashion, 1968. Anyway, despite my love for classic 1910s styles, Emilie and Gustav's designs were not typical for the time and were called "reform dress". They're incredible to look at because they still have appeal today, but they don't really seem to belong to any specific time. 

Many of the clothes in Klimt's paintings were real garments that she designed, and likewise, some of the most striking clothing she made was designed by him. There are limited photos of her work and even fewer surviving garments due to a fire, but the modern high fashion brand Valentino (founded 1960) made their Fall 2015 collection a homage to Emilie Floge and her work. Gustav took most of the photos that we have of Emilie and she almost always looks so happy and mischievous.

I just finished reading a novel called the Painted Kiss (by Elizabeth Hickey) that was a fictionalized account of their relationship. It was such an interesting period for art, producing Egon Schiele (another favorite of mine) and other strange visionaries surrounding the Art Nouveau movement and its offshoots, namely the Wiener Werkstätte group. There seems to have been a bit of a free love philosophy going on in that group and their patrons, which is always something that sort of fascinates me. It is suspected that the famous "Kiss" painting is modeled after Emilie and Gustav. He was a troubling character in the book and probably in real life, having fathered at least 14 children by a variety of women and not really taking responsibility for any of them. 

This robe (above) reminds me of the B. Cohen one I just bought! I like Gustav's robes too.

The whole idea of an artist's collective (especially one that was so avante-garde and eventually hugely successful) is alluring to me because it seems like we don't have that kind of thing anymore where there's specific places and times where like-minded artists or writers create a movement that changes....everything. Maybe those movements only appear in hindsight? Anyway, according to the novel, Emilie and Gustav's personal lives were a bit tortured, but/and there work remains some some of the most inspiring to me in my own work. 

I am unsure which details in the novel are real and which are not, but most of the Wiener Werkstatte group died or left Austria right around the beginning of the first World War, and their work was confiscated or destroyed during the second World War. It makes me so sad to think of what was lost and how surviving members, such as Emilie (who died in 1952) must have felt like that exciting, fruitful time of their artist's movement was dead and gone in so many ways, locked in her past. That sort of thing resonates with me so much, when a chapter in your life is closed and you can never revisit it. 

One of the most influential members of the Wiener Werkstatte group was Joseph Hoffman, an architect. It's fascinating to look at the work of all the members and see how they overlap and inspired one another. Hoffman's jewelry (although not this particular piece - it just happens to be my favorite) looks like Klimt's paintings which look like Emilie's clothing, etc. Hoffman designed a fantastically beautiful mansion for a banker, called the Palais Stoclet. Klimt helped design it and many of his paintings decorate the inside. (The interior shown below is not from the palace, but gives you an idea of the style and shows how Klimt's artwork hung in the spaces his friends designed. I'm crazy about it!)

Emilie was known for hand-painted silk. At the time, whale bone corsets were still worn regularly, but Emilie pioneered "the house dress", which still looks pretty fancy to us today! One of the blog posts about her I was looking through called her an "anarchist of style", and it makes me fall in love.

I really wish I could see this last one in color.

Once you start poking around in the Wiener Werkstatte movement, you start seeing its influence on designers like John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Tim Walker, and others. I love learning about these things and letting them affect me. It makes me feel a part of something old, new, and secret all at the same time. I have never been a minimalist, and I love the complexity and meaning in that turn-of-the-century style. In some ways I don't "believe" in minimalism because reality is not simple to me. I guess minimalism would be escapism for me, but I have no desire to escape there most of the time. Order yes, simplicity never. Now I just need to save up my pennies to fill my art gallery (er...closet) with Emilie inspired pieces.