Publication details
‘The Car and the Dirndl Get Along Well’: Modernity and Tradition in 1930s Austrian Fashion and Tourist Design
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Central Europe |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2024.2432042 |
| Keywords | Austria tourism Austrofascism design souvenir culture |
| Description | This essay explores the ambivalence of Austrian rural modernity in the 1930s. It emphasises tourism’s role as a contributing force in constructing this ambivalence. Tourism not only provided necessary financial support but also connected Austria to a global industry of fashion, design, and popular culture at a time when rural elements regained importance in mainstream culture. It offered an interpretative framework that softened the regime’s reactionary interpretations of rural culture and ostensibly heightened its connection to urban cosmopolitan elites. The different models of rural modernism assessed in this essay provide insight into a time when tradition, regionalism, and modernity represented the central paradox of Austrian culture. They show that rural culture, which became a central aspect of Austrian ideology, could not simply be categorized as state-supported reactionary modernism or as a cosmopolitan ‘plaything’ by urban artists venturing into the provinces. Channelled through various facets of Austrian design, which were closely tied to the country’s presentation as a paradise of leisure, rural modernism’s ‘nationalist cosmopolitanism’ instead emerges as a complex set of elements that uniquely disseminated modern Austrian rural culture to the local and international urban middle class, ultimately obscuring the complex social and political dynamics at its core. |