UFA @ 100: The Girl from Till 12 - the New Woman

But its design elements speak volumes about the role of popular female actors in film and society, and about the role fashion played in both.

Along with Brigitte Helm, Renate Müller and Hertha Thiele, "The Girl from Till 12" lead Dina Gralla represented this fresh new girl-next-door, who had a sexual and social independence that challenged German cultural norms.

The movie’s star Gralla embodies the era’s holy trinity of cinema, culture and consumerism. She's illustrated in a somewhat stylized manner and steps forward from the massed squares like an object of merchandise; she’s further outlined in a bolt of vivid yellow—and not unlike a spotlit mannequin in a shop window, where visual display makes dramatic use of directed light. Her director, male co-star and supporting cast names recede into the crossword and all but disappear, while her billing as the titular department store cashier jumps out.

Gralla's sleeveless short dress and stockings outfit is garçonne—the term coined from Victor Margeritte’s scandalous 1922 novel about an emancipated female libertine—the nonchalance of her reclined, relaxed pose also suggests the indolence of the single working woman, newly visible, who has both the financial freedom of disposable income and free time. (It also suggests the new insolent attitude that comes from both.) In the anthology Women in the Metropolis, Sabina Hake argues that the production of inexpensive Konfektionsware helped the new, less restrictive clothing styles become associated with sexual freedom and freedom of movement (accessible glamour combined with the comfort to walk unfettered around the city on foot or easily by transit).

The recognizable Vogue aesthetic of the poster design is important context. In 1928, together with Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Austrian-born graphic designer Herbert Bayer left the Bauhaus and moved to Berlin. He became art director of the new German Vogue regional edition Conde Nast was launching that year. (It was short-lived: Published from April 1928, it had an initial bi-weekly run of about 18 months but folded after the 1929 Crash, and it would not return until 1979).

Notably, Bayer had created the Bauhaus’s sans-serif Universal typeface and while at Vogue, he proceeded to promote the same bold but simple geometric aesthetic on the newsstand. His covers were also notable in that they reflected the increased visibility and independence of the single working woman during the inflation years of the 1920s: the illustrations usually featured a solitary Jazz Age-style woman with a bob haircut who was availing herself of the latest technology (a telephone, an automobile), shopping, applying makeup or enjoying carefree nightlife.

It’s striking how much of a command Fenneker demonstrates of this visual fashion grammar. His concept treatment and dynamic graphic design of the poster closely resemble the prevailing commercial aesthetic shaped by Bayer—it has more in common with the illustrated German Vogue covers by artists like Pierre Mourgue, Benito and George Lepape than Fenneker’s previous work. And if Fenneker paid more attention to clothing than most, it’s because he was also a set and costume designer for stage productions; he had also been contributing regular fashion illustration to the art journals Jugend and Simplicissimus.

There was regular interplay between the spectacle of fashion and film: When Helm was photographed for German Vogue in the autumn of 1928, for example, she was wearing costume gowns from her film "L’Argent". With "The Girl from Till 12", Gralla was fresh from the success of playing a stylish well-married former model in Richard Eichberg’s runaway hit "The Masked Mannequin" ("Der Fürst von Pappenheim"), with all the costumes provided by upscale Berlin fashion house Gerson. Their androgynous physique signature Eton crop, or Bubikopf cut (and its ubiquitous accessory, the brimless cloche hat) was not only chic, it was suitable for low-maintenance active lifestyles and pragmatic for the factory work of their primary cinema audience.

The late 1920s of this film marked the peak of the Konfektionsfilm subgenre: those energetic fashion farces often set in designer houses, shops or department stores called Konfektionskomödie that flourished before the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis. On screen and off, the milieu held the promise of self-fashioned identity and social mobility; the films were populated by salesgirls, models, designers and customers, featured mistaken identity plots and often, the aspirational and transformative effects of makeovers and new wardrobes. And these coincided, as Mila Ganeva’s study Women in Weimar Fashion outlines, with the flourishing of Berlin’s garment industry.

According to Conde Nast, they began publishing the regional German edition of Vogue in response to demand in Berlin, where a broad range of working and middle-class women clamoured for fashion magazine that reflected their interests as self-aware and independent women. It’s hard to overstate the centrality of fashion to the liberated Weimar women’s experience of modernity. By the mid-1920s there were more than 1.5 million working women in Berlin, a third of them in some way involved in the garment industry (it’s also worth mentioning that the New Woman spent about 25% of her income on fashion). Much of their inspiration came from the movie palaces, where fashion was an integral part of the most popular cinematic mise-en-scène, so it’s little wonder that promotional posters followed suit. “The Berlin fashion season has gone mad,” German Vogue said that year; “It is not a season any more, it is a permanent wave.’

Nathalie Atkinson is an award-winning freelance arts and culture writer and a columnist for The Globe and Mail. She is a member of the Toronto Film Critics Association and programs Designing the Movies, the costume and production design-focused film and lecture series held at Toronto’s historic Revue Cinema. As a former fashion critic, Atkinson takes a special interest in material culture and object-driven social history. Follow her on Twitter and on Instagram.

Image: poster artwork: Josef Fenneker courtesy Austrian National Library