Patent Trousers (Spotting Raoul),
Berlinische Galerie, Museum für moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin, 2022

Artists Wear Fashion

Fashion and art are mirrors of social changes and individual needs. In the collection of the Berlinische Galerie, this theme is present in surprising and diverse ways. In the era of modernism, artists’ clothing was not limited to painters’ smocks. In Berlin in 1929, the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann posed in front of August Sander’s camera in his self-designed ‘Oxford trousers’.

With her textile objects and installations, Alexandra Hopf interprets historical sources, such as the Constructivist uniform clothing designed after the Russian Revolution by artists such as Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Alexander Rodchenko. For the exhibition, the artist realises Raoul Hausmann’s ‘Oxford trousers’ as a textile object. This resulted in a study of this garment, its creation, and its use. Alexandra Hopf developed an installation from this, which restages the garment by means of colour, movement, light, and sound.

A photograph by August Sander from 1929 depicts the Dadaist posing in front of the camera in white Oxford trousers. The cotton twill trousers fall with a very wide flare. They are a model that was considered subversive and therefore highly fashionable amongst Oxford students at that time. There are various versions of the trousers` origin (...)

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