Total Work of Fashion: Bernhard Willhelm and the Contemporary Avant-Garde

In fashion discourse, the term avant-garde is often applied to garments that fall outside of the mainstream fashion, whether experimental, conceptual or intellectual. However, such usage overlooks the social and political aims of the historical, artistic avant-gardes. Through an examination of the contemporary avant-garde fashion label Bernhard Willhelm led by designers Bernhard Wilhelm and Jutta Kraus this dissertation reconnects the historical or original vanguard and its revolutionary potential and proposes that Bernhard Willhelm belongs to an emerging, contemporary narrative of the avant-garde that intersects with fashion. In this study, I analyze Willhelm and Krauss collections, ephemera, runway presentations, exhibitions, online media, fashion films and critical reception from the brands inception in 1999 to 2016. Firstly, I develop the notion of fashion-time and contend that Willhelm and Krauss designs reject accelerated change, oscillating between the temporalities of fashion and anti-fashion and fashion and art. Secondly, I argue that the designers devise a political fashion, one that simultaneously critiques global politics and challenges norms in the fashion system. Thirdly, I assert that enduring collaboration with other cultural producers underpins Willhelm and Krauss work. The interdisciplinarity born of their collective work informs their spectacular visual language, the of sum of which I term a total work of fashion. By exploring these tenets of Willhelm and Krauss practice, I demonstrate that the avant-garde project is dynamic and in constant flux, at times incorporating dialectical facets that continually expand the disciplines of fashion and art.