"LUXURY & LIFESTYLE.

WEIMAR UND DIE WEITE WELT"

at the Goethe Museum, Düsseldorf 

4 November 2021

Since 26 October, the Düsseldorf Goethe Museum has been hosting the exhibition "Luxury & Lifestyle. Weimar and the Wide World". It was in Weimar that Germany's first fashion magazine, the "Journal des Luxus und der Moden", was published from 1786 to 1827.

Today, Vogue rules the kingdom of fashion and its global editor-in-chief is the only queen. But despite its reign for 130 years, it was not Germany's first fashion magazine. More than a century older than "Vogue" is the first German fashion magazine, the "Journal des Luxus und der Moden", whose first issue appeared in January 1786. A significant year, as the last dress code was issued in Germany in that year. It was precisely these dress codes that had separated the classes from each other by law for centuries. An understanding of fashion in today's sense as a free expression of individuality only became possible in a time of social upheaval. 

The magazine, which caused a sensation from its second year onwards under the title "Journal des Luxus und der Moden" (Journal of Luxury and Fashion), was Germany's most successful journalistic enterprise for decades. The issues had an orange cover and this colour was associated with 'luxury' and 'fashion' at the time. And that was some 150 years before the French leather goods manufacturer Hermès once again associated such orange as a corporate colour with luxury goods. 

In accordance with the plural of the word 'fashion' (from the French mode: kind), the magazine not only dealt with the preferred way of dressing, doing one's hair and putting on make-up at the time of publication in the narrower sense, but also with other objects or activities that were currently 'à la mode'. Thus, the journal regularly provided information on interiors, literature, theatre, politics and social gossip.

For a whole four decades, from 1786 to 1827, the magazine set the tone. And because it endured despite the turbulent times between the Revolution and the Restoration and registered the social changes in Europe with a critical eye, it is also an important source of cultural history today. 

The Goethe Museum's collection includes 42 complete volumes of the journal and numerous objects featured in the magazine, such as jewellery and accessories, furniture, silver, porcelain and glass. 

In the special exhibition, luxury products of today are juxtaposed and the visitor can see how many a trend from back then inspires the design of today. The exhibition shows gemstone rings by Goethe and Joseph Haydn, a miniature set in gold that Angelika Kauffmann gave to Duchess Anna Amalia, jewellery by the Tsar's daughter Maria Pavlovna and those from the family of the composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, as well as a costume jewellery ensemble made personally for Coco Chanel.

"We are writing the chronicle of the spirit of our time, insofar as it is ruled, guided and shaped by fashion".

The editor of "Journal des Luxus und der Moden". 

The "Journal des Luxus und der Moden" was published in the classical city of Weimar. It was founded by the publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747-1822), who was a successful businessman and industrious networker. Co-publisher was Georg Melchior Kraus (1737-1806), director of the Royal drawing school. Correspondents at home and abroad were acquired and thus a cosmopolitanism of fashion became possible even from the provinces. Both publishers had to fend off attacks to justify their new project. The Weimar poets and thinkers feared a triumph of superficiality. Even if Goethe himself later published articles in the "Journal des Luxus und der Moden" and used its advertising section to promote his own publications, it was still a flag rag to him: "But it is as if everything witty flew this fire-coloured cover," he wrote to Schiller in January 1796. 

"Luxury is the plague of the states. It wastes the pure income on useless expenditure, dissolves all feeling for morality and honour,

disrupts the prosperity of families and supplies the state with droves of beggars".

But Bertuch and Kraus equally quote the proponents:

"Luxury is the richest source for the state; the all-powerful lever of industry, and the most powerful engine of circulation.

It creates arts, sciences, commerce and trade, and brings about the enjoyment and happiness of life!" 

In 1823, the Journal wrote of fashion:

"It is not to be trusted with great perseverance. Its essence and innermost striving is change, increase. It wants extremes, now the largest,

then the smallest, and so with the wide and narrow, colourful and colourless, covered and uncovered." 

Fashion is only constant in its impermanence - then as now.

THE EXHIBITION

"Luxury & Lifestyle. Weimar  und die weite Welt"

26 October 2021 to 20 February 2022 

Goethe Museum Düsseldorf  - Anton and Katharina Kippenberg Foundation Schloss Jägerhof

Jacobistrasse 2, Düsseldorf

www.goethe-museum.de

The Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf is one of the three major Goethe archives and research centres and houses the largest private Goethe collection in the world, comprising some 50,000 objects. The institution includes the museum, the manuscript archive, the research library, the art collection and an event centre.

Under the motto Goethe and his Time, the cultural history museum displays original manuscripts, books, paintings, graphics, busts and arts and crafts in an architecturally outstanding building dating from the 18th century: the Schloss Jägerhof, built by order of Elector Carl Theodor of the Palatinate.

The museum's mission is to historically research Goethe's work and document its reception up to today's literature. The aim is not the adoration of a plaster bust, but a lively critical approach to a multi-layered universal genius.

By G.

4 November 2021