The Fashion Revolution: From Berlin to London

Kings Place, Hall 2

A panel discussion focussing on two new publications, with Daniel Snowman, Michael Gee, Uwe Westphal, author of Fashion Metropolis Berlin1836-1939: The Story of the Rise and Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry and Anna Nyburg, author of The Clothes on our Backs: How Refugees from Nazism Revitalised the British Fashion Trade.

Nineteenth century Berlin was the creative centre for fashion and ready-to-wear clothing. Berlin’s clothing companies made modern apparel and developed new designs that were sold not only throughout Germany, but worldwide. But when Hitler came to power in 1933, the city’s mainly Jewish clothing industrialists were robbed, displaced or murdered, while their companies were ‘Aryanized’. What happened to those who escaped to Britain – and how did they revolutionise fashion in the UK?