<\/span><\/p>\n S<\/span>ome cities lend themselves to better comparisons than others. As the capitals of the two German-speaking empires (the Prussian and Habsburg, respectively), Berlin and Vienna are well positioned for comparison, particularly due to the very different ways the two cities have come to figure in the global popular imaginary on account of their very different historical trajectories. Upstart Berlin with its background as a Garnisonstadt <\/span>(garrison city) has become the \u201cpoor but sexy\u201d clubbing capital of Europe (see Bauer and Hosek), while Residenzstadt <\/span>Vienna\u2014the city that effectively served as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire from the time the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II established his residence there in the early 17th<\/span> century to its dissolution by Napoleon in 1806 and as home to the Habsburgs for most of the past millennium\u2014, steadfastly remains a capital of faded imperial splendor (Figures 1 and 2). These imaginaries inform the ways in which these two cities\u2019 respective fashion systems have responded to contemporary global pressures brought about by flows of capital, goods, and people, as well as the way the global fashion system has engaged with them. As of the time of writing, the Sartorialist still<\/span> had not visited Vienna, while there are 40 images from Berlin on his site.2<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Figure 1 On the Street\u2026 Mitte, Berlin Figure 2 Caf\u00e9 Griensteidl on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna\u00a0(photo: M. Reisenleitner)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The mechanisms by which Berlin and Vienna have come to figure differently and the role of visual style culture in both forming and greasing the circuits underpinning their respective urban imaginaries are the subject of this contribution. Building on both Doreen Massey\u2019s argument about the identity of modern places being constituted as much by their relation with other places as by anything intrinsic to their location (Massey) and Rosi Braidotti\u2019s understanding of a place as \u201can embedded and embodied memory: it is a set of counter-memories, which are activated by the resisting thinker against the grain of the dominant representations of subjectivity\u201d (Blaagaard and Tuin 203), I juxtapose the career paths of two designers whose work resists the mainstream of bourgeois respectability: Hedi Slimane (Figure 3) and Helmut Lang (Figure 4). I show how their relations have, in the case of Slimane and Berlin, and have not, in the case of Lang and Vienna, come to play a role in constituting these cities\u2019 global identities. The relational nature of these locational identities and their (visual) styles is thus shown to be intimately tied to the cities\u2019 urban imaginaries, which work by making hegemonic particular periods and styles of the cities\u2019 histories. In positioning Lang\u2019s or Slimane\u2019s work as resistant, I am not contesting their prominence as <\/span>fashion designers but rather pointing to the relation between the radical nature of their visions and their associating, or not, with the urban imaginaries of Berlin and Vienna. As Bradley Quinn pointed out in his review of the Radical Fashion<\/span> exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2001-2002, radical is a relative concept that, when applied to uncompromising collections such as Lang\u2019s, \u201cimplies a sudden thrill of meanings that themselves quicken, mutate, rupture, fissure, or collapse. Fashion designers working in this vein reshape the body, design according to philosophical and intellectual concerns, push boundaries, challenge perceptions, and usurp conformity to give form to extravagant projects of the imagination\u201d (Quinn 442). What interests me here is not so much the collections themselves, about which Fashion Studies scholars have made many insightful observations (Rees-Roberts,\u201cBoys Keep Swinging\u201d; Bowstead; Arnold, \u201cHeroin Chic\u201d),3<\/a><\/span><\/span> but rather the relations between the imaginations underpinning these works and the cities in which they came into being. In the trend-setting work of both Slimane and Lang:<\/p>\n Conspicuous consumption is refused in favor of dress strategies that are disquieting and unknowable by those outside the coterie of youth culture, a form of resistance to imposed definitions of identity and lifestyle. They emit a feeling of being adrift from society as a whole; the youth culture that fashion was drawing upon becomes a series of satellites that deny inclusion in establishment ideals. (Arnold, \u201cHeroin Chic\u201d 286\u201387)<\/p>\n Yet Berlin\u2019s urban imaginary has been able to take that resistance into its own urban imaginary, while Vienna\u2019s has not. As importantly illustrated<\/span> here, the experiences of these designers and their relations to these cities can help us understand, and see<\/span>, why.<\/p>\n Figure 3 Hedi Slimane (Victor Soto)<\/p><\/div>\n Figure 4 Helmut Lang, 2008 (courtesy of HL-ART)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n Helmut Lang is the fashion designer associated with Vienna to have achieved the greatest renown internationally, but he did not do so as a specifically Viennese fashion designer. While Lang may have started out in Vienna with a boutique called Bou Bou Lang in 1979, he used the success that his use of unconventional materials and minimalist utilitarianism in designs garnered as a springboard to get to Paris, not to mention his \u201cViennese-ness\u201d4<\/a><\/span><\/span>, which is not intended as a stylistic marker but simply a reflection of his background. The connection helped him to show a collection in 1986 in conjunction with the monumental \u201cVienne 1880-1939: L\u2019apocalypse joyeuse\/Vienna 1900\/Traum und Wirklichkeit\u201d exhibition at Centre Georges Pompidou that brought a renewed appreciation of Vienna\u2019s Jugendstil\/art nouveau cultural heritage and popularized it elsewhere (Ingram and Reisenleitner, Wiener Chic<\/span> 162). In Paris, he founded his own label and showed his first ready-to-wear collection before decamping for New York, where \u201cin April 2000, he became the first non-American designer to become part of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), a group which had named him Best International Designer of the Year in 1996\u201d (162), and began working with Jenny Holzer on the design of his boutiques (Figure 5). Now a prominent component of the Fashion Studies canon for his experimental s\u00e9ances de travail<\/span> and early use of the internet, \u201cit was Lang\u2019s cool, urban silhouettes, marrying basic shapes with edgy color combinations and advanced technological fabrics, which were both the crucial look for fashion insiders, and the key influence on other designers, eager to find a new vision of the modern\u201d (Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century<\/span> 20, qtd. in Rees-Roberts, \u201cRaf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern\u201d 14). However, Lang quickly grew disenchanted by the growing consolidation of the fashion industry into conglomerates. When the Prada Group sought to consolidate its position as a leading luxury conglomerate at the end of the 1990s by acquiring labels and came knocking at Helmut Lang, he first ceded 51% of his company in 1999 and the remainder in 2004. He left the company the following year, retired from fashion, and has since been devoting himself to his work as an artist. As we argue in Wiener Chic<\/span>, Lang\u2019s refusal to kowtow to global fashion\u2019s powers-that-be, maintaining instead a relationship to the fashion world resolutely on his own terms,5<\/a><\/span><\/span> is indicative of, and in keeping with, the larger Viennese fashion system, just as the rest of the city\u2019s non-high culture, tourist-oriented cultural production exists in a state of relative invisibility globally (Ingram and Reisenleitner, Wiener Chic<\/span><\/em> 161).<\/p>\n Figure 5 Helmut Lang boutique in Westbourne Grove, London (photo: S. Ingram)<\/p>\n Just as forces propelled Helmut Lang out of Vienna, so too did others attract Hedi Slimane to Berlin. Slimane\u2019s fashion path ran more immediately through Paris than Lang\u2019s. Having studied art history at the \u00c9cole du Louvre, his initial participation in the fashion world was in the early 1990s as an assistant on a Louis Vuitton project to reimagine the brand. After a formative period with Yves Saint Laurent, during which he rose to the position of artistic director, Slimane, like Lang, gained fame by pioneering a rebellious, tight-legged look.6<\/a><\/span><\/span> While Lang had brought a \u201cpunk, distressed look to the catwalk\u201d in the 1990s (Arnold, \u201cHeroin Chic\u201d 286), \u201cSlimane\u2019s reputation is founded on having streamlined and rejuvenated the male silhouette through the promotion of a skinny style appropriated from youth subcultures\u201d during his tenure at Dior from 2000-2007 (Rees-Roberts, \u201cBoys Keep Swinging\u201d 7).7<\/a><\/span><\/span> Rees-Roberts emphasizes, \u201cOf [Slimane\u2019s] collections for Dior Homme, those in 2005 and 2006 are emblematic of his transposition of the revival English mod look made famous by the designer\u2019s unofficial muse at the time, musician Pete Doherty\u201d (Rees-Roberts, \u201cBoys Keep Swinging\u201d 9), but he also cannot help but note \u201cthe figure of David Bowie looming large over Slimane\u2019s luxury transposition of street style, particularly the singer\u2019s incarnations in the mid- to late 1970s\u201d (Rees-Roberts, \u201cBoys Keep Swinging\u201d 13). Calling on the evidence of Slimane\u2019s early photography, Rees-Roberts identifies the attraction as based on \u201c[t]he retro allure of Eastern European militarism\u201d (Rees-Roberts, \u201cBoys Keep Swinging\u201d 14), a regional focus that effaces the influence of Berlin and its urban imaginary.8<\/a><\/span><\/span> After all, it was to Berlin that Slimane relocated after YSL was taken over by Gucci in 1999 and he learned he would have a new boss:<\/p>\n Tom Ford, the creative director at Gucci, who insisted that Slimane report to him. \u201cIt was a totally new idea to me, this story of \u2018reporting,\u2019\u201d Slimane told me. (His English is good but not perfect.) \u201cI might have never heard the word \u2018reporting\u2019 before. Reporting to Tom was not going to happen.\u201d Berg\u00e9 objected to the arrangement, too. \u201cI was absolutely against it,\u201d he told me. \u201cTom Ford is not my cup of tea. I don\u2019t respect him, not at all. He is not a designer. He is a marketing man.\u201d After meeting with Ford at the Ritz (\u201cThe situation became unpleasant,\u201d Slimane said), Slimane resigned. (Paumgarten)<\/p>\n Between 2000 and 2002 Slimane undertook an artistic residency at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, which resulted in his first photography book, Berlin<\/span>, a glossy publication by Editions 7L\/Steidl (the L stands for Lagerfeld), which contains images he took during his tenure in the city.<\/p>\n The importance of Bowie to Slimane, and of Berlin to that relationship, is not to be underestimated. In \u201cChanges: Bowie\u2019s Life Story,\u201d her contribution to the David Bowie Is\u2026 <\/span>catalogue, Oriole Cullen includes a quote by Bowie \u201c[d]iscussing his approach to fashion in 2005\u201d: \u201cExplaining that he was currently wearing clothes by one particular designer, he said, \u2018I just rely on Hedi Slimane [\u2026]. I\u2019ve always been extremely lucky that there\u2019s always been some designer or other who wants to give me clothes. For the last little while Hedi Slimane has wardrobed me\u201d (Cullen 258). Apparently Slimane sent some early designs to Bowie, who commented that \u201cThe stuff was apparently influenced by the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, <\/span>and it was all that very slim-line black, and it\u2019s very much become his signature look\u201d (qtd. in Cullen 258).9<\/a><\/span><\/span> The David Bowie Is\u2026 <\/span>catalogue includes images of the 2002 blue silk suit that Slimane designed for Bowie\u2019s Heathen<\/span> tour, the same kind of skinny suit that Karl Lagerfeld famously lost 90 pounds in order to be able to wear (Figure 6). When Slimane won the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for international designer in 2002 (the award Helmut Lang won in 1996), Bowie was there to present him with it.<\/p>\n Figure 6 Slimane-designed suit for Bowie (photo: S. Ingram)<\/p>\n Figure 7 One of the images from Stages that Hedi Slimane republished on the occasion of Bowie\u2019s death. (\u201cHedi Slimane\u2019s Tribute to David Bowie\u201d)<\/p>\n The week Bowie died, in January 2016, Slimane posted images of Bowie that he had taken as part of his Stage <\/span>project, which point to a decided sense of loss (Figure 7).10<\/a><\/span><\/span> He also published a touchingly personal tribute to Bowie in the 2016 spring issue of the Victoria & Albert Museum\u2019s V&A Magazine<\/span>, in which he confesses that Bowie was something of a talismanic, god-like figure for him:<\/p>\n July 1975. 8 June 1983. Hippodrome d\u2019Auteuil. My first concert. David died and left us alone. The anecdote depicted in the initial part of the poem seems to have been common knowledge, given that it was used to open a 2006 piece entitled \u201cPretty Things\u201d in the New Yorker<\/span>:<\/p>\n Hedi Slimane sits alone in his room, in a pleasant but not very fashionable part of Paris, mooning over an album cover. He has just turned six. The year is 1974. The record, a birthday gift from a friend of his older sister, is \u201cDavid Live\u201d\u2014David Bowie, recorded at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia. The friend, V\u00e9ronique, likes to put on a blue jumpsuit and imitate Bowie. She does a good Mick Jagger, too. Slimane is captivated by her. He is also captivated by the album cover, which features a photograph of Bowie onstage, dressed in a powder-blue double-breasted suit: the jacket is cut short, with narrow but square shoulders, and the pants, although pleated and billowy in the legs, are tight at the crotch. Bowie looks bloodless and emaciated, well on his way to his \u201cThin White Duke\u201d phase, during which he subsisted, as he later said, on \u201cpeppers, cocaine, and milk.\u201d In his poetic tribute to Bowie a decade later, Slimane returns to this scene to correct the year and his age\u2014it was 1975 so he was seven not six, and the colour scheme\u2014it was Veronique\u2019s eye glitter that was blue, not the jumpsuit, which was black vinyl. Calling her \u201cthe prettiest thing\u201d both hearkens back to and makes explicit the reference in Nick Paumgarten\u2019s title to Bowie\u2019s \u201cThe Prettiest Star,\u201d one of the tracks on the 1973 Aladdin Sane. <\/span>Its cover is the one featuring the colourful thunderbolt makeup that was selected from all of Bowie\u2019s albums for the cover of David Bowie Is\u2026 <\/span>catalogue, but repurposed so that the eyes return the viewers\u2019 gaze for the catalogue instead of remaining downturned as they were on the album cover.12<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n These connections encourage us to return to Slimane\u2019s Berlin residency. While he, like Bowie, had also lived in Los Angeles and New York, it is not those cities but rather the influence of Berlin and a key part of its urban imaginary that can be shown to provide a germinal link between the two. The images of Bowie that Slimane reproduced as a tribute were first taken in 2003 for his Stages project, that is, the year after his Berlin stay, after he had designed Bowie\u2019s Heathen <\/span>tour suit, and Bowie had presented him with the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for international designer. Slimane\u2019s experiences during his artist residency in Berlin from 2000 to 2002 bear a striking resemblance to Bowie\u2019s heady stay in the city from 1976 to 1978. In both cases the artists were escaping situations that were not good for them (Bowie, Los Angeles; Slimane, YSL), and Berlin proved a fertile space for innovation. Slimane\u2019s Berlin stay resulted not only in the first of several photography books, but also exhibitions at the Kunstwerke, MOMA\/PS1 in New York, and the Koyanagi Gallery in Tokyo. Like Bowie, Slimane was able to find inroads into the kind of locals he could relate to in Berlin, but not only in Berlin, of course. As noted in The New Yorker<\/span>:<\/p>\n Slimane also collects places. Paris bores him; it lacks a youth culture, or a sense of energetic disenchantment. He lives there because it is his home, and couture\u2019s. (He has an apartment on the Quai Voltaire, overlooking the Seine and the Louvre.) And so for stimulus he chooses other cities. Like David Bowie\u2019s humanoid alien in \u201cThe Man Who Fell to Earth,\u201d who came here to procure water for his own planet, Slimane spends a lot of his time in this or that town, quietly observing its citizens and ways, in order to extract its visual resources. In recent years, it\u2019s been London. He distills some kind of Londonness, filters it through a Paris atelier, and offers it back, in suspenders and fancy boots (Paumgarten).<\/p>\n When he first began at Dior, Slimane sent the locals he encountered in Berlin down the runway to change the look of men\u2019s fashion just as decisively as Bowie\u2019s Berlin albums changed the sound of pop music:<\/p>\n Slimane is said to have transformed the male silhouette. He produced jackets that were cut short, with narrow, square shoulders, and teamed them with very skinny trousers \u2013 exquisitely made, super-tight tailoring that was designed with rock stars in mind, but was greeted with so many standing ovations on the catwalk that pretty soon everyone from Versace to Topman referenced Dior Homme in their collections (Davis).<\/p>\n No less an authoritative fashion figure than international editor Suzy Menkes claims to have sensed \u201can undercurrent of Berlin\u2019s unsettling history\u201d in Slimane\u2019s Dior Homme shows, \u201cand especially in [his] photographs\u2014there is: dense darkness, danger, Weimar decadence, a grinding Communist regime, brutal buildings, shady cellars, nihilistic depravity\u201d (Menkes), something that can also be heard in Low<\/span>, \u201cHeroes<\/span>,\u201d<\/span> and Lodger<\/span>, which are credited, in their experimental minimalism, with picking up on the dark currents that fascinated Bowie about the city and had brought him there (cf. T. J. Seabrook).<\/p>\n Bowie\u2019s influence on Slimane is reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood\u2019s on Bowie. Bowie was captivated by what had taken Isherwood to Berlin in the 1930s, just as Slimane was by what had taken Bowie there in the 1970s. However, while Bowie was attracted to the dark historical elements of Berlin that Menkes describes, which he found in Isherwood\u2019s work as well as in German expressionist art,13<\/a><\/span><\/span> Slimane seems to have been attracted to the look emanating from Bowie\u2019s connection to the city, specifically the 1981 film Christiane F\/ Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo<\/span>. Christiane Felscherinow\u2019s teenage experiences with drugs and prostitution were first turned into a bestselling reportage by two Stern <\/span>reporters, which Uli Edel then turned into a cult film that memorably featured a Bowie concert and soundtrack. Felscherinow has garnered, if not exactly enjoyed, a certain measure of renown ever since and recently published a memoir in an attempt to advocate for support and assistance for drug dependency, something she still struggles with (Felscherinow and Vukovich; cf. Ingram).<\/p>\n Befitting Felscherinow\u2019s cult status, it is not difficult to find images of her younger self online, and it is also not difficult to ascertain her lifestyle from them.14<\/a><\/span><\/span> It is not just the case, however, that Felscherinow belonged to a slightly earlier version of the Berlin scene from which Slimane drew his inspiration. Rather, as is apparent from images online from Christiane F: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo<\/span>, it was the film version of her story, which features a cult-inducing soundtrack by Bowie, including \u201cHeroes\/ Helden\u201d and \u201cBoys Keep Swinging,\u201d from which Slimane drew his aesthetic inspiration (Figure 8, Figure 9). That so many black-and-white images of a colour<\/span> film circulate online via Google images speaks to the broader popularity of this aesthetic, highly influential on Slimane and others.<\/p>\n Figure 8 Christiane F. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (Images \u00a91981 Solaris Film, Maran Film, Popular Filmproduktion, CLV-Filmproduktions, S\u00fcddeutscher Rundfunk)<\/p>\n Figure 9 collage from Slimane\u2019s Berlin collection (S. Ingram)<\/p>\n While Slimane does not seem to have written any poems about the film or commented on it in interviews, one can see from the following images that it is not merely the heroin chic look of Christiane F.<\/span> that is at issue, but rather a stance (Figure 10, Figure 11), one clearly associated in Christiane F.<\/span> with Bowie and Bowie fandom\u2014shooting from the back over the shoulder, a look which has become one of Slimane\u2019s trademarks (Figure 12) (Figure 13).<\/p>\n Figure 10 Christiane F. Wir Kinder vom Bahnof Zoo, looking at Bowie poster (Images \u00a9 1981 Solaris Film, Maran Film, Popular Filmproduktion, CLV-Filmproduktions, S\u00fcddeutscher Rundfunk)<\/p>\n Figure 11 Christiane F. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, at the concert (Images \u00a9 1981 Solaris Film, Maran Film, Popular Filmproduktion, CLV-Filmproduktions, S\u00fcddeutscher Rundfunk)<\/p>\n Figure 12 One of the images of Bowie from the back from the Stage collection that Slimane republished on the occasion of Bowie\u2019s death<\/p>\n Figure 13 random collage of Slimane photos (S. Ingram)<\/p>\n In adopting this stance as one of his signature aesthetics, Slimane was making a locational relation<\/span> to Bowie premised on a stylistic connection to \u201cpoor but sexy\u201d Berlin, <\/span>which served to establish him as the same kind of resisting artist as Bowie, interested in creating images and styles that run counter to representations of the dominant bourgeois order and that similarly propelled him to stardom.<\/span>15<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n This notion of locational relation can also help us to gauge the imaginative distance between Berlin and Vienna. I am not suggesting that Vienna has not, or cannot, serve as a site of counter-memories that work against the grain of the dominant representations of subjectivity. Indeed, Wiener Chic<\/em> details where many such locations are to be found, which would have provided Helmut Lang with the type of fashion space he was seeking had they existed while he lived there. Whether the detectives in Soko Donau<\/em>, who solve crimes involving people and substances trafficked into and out of Vienna and its surroundings (Figure 14); the Iranian migrant in I Love Vienna<\/em> (Houchang Allahyari, 1991), who has to help his sister and son find their way in their new and not exactly hospitable environment (<\/span>Figure 15); or the musician who has to extricate himself from shady dealings involving pirated Whitney Houston CDs in <\/span>Blutrausch<\/em> (Thomas Roth, 1997, <\/span>Figure 16); they all find themselves in locations that work against the grain of, rather than in conjunction with, the city\u2019s dominant representation of imperial splendour. When they take to land, the Soko Donau<\/em> detectives do not ride in the kind of style one traditionally associates with the city: the Fiaker or horse-drawn carriage (<\/span>Figure 17); the Iranian migrants find themselves housed in one of the city\u2019s seedier districts with prostitutes for neighbours\u2014the 2. Leopoldstadt, which has in the meantime undergone substantial gentrification (<\/span>Figure 18, cf. Suitner)); and the Blutrausch<\/em> musician, who is played by Ostbahn Kurti, one of Vienna\u2019s most colourful countercultural characters, ends up in bondage after being abducted at a punk concert at the Arena (<\/span>Figure 19). Even when tourist sites do appear in these productions, they are rubbed against the grain to show how little the imperial histories they stand for matter in the lives of contemporary residents from and on the peripheries (<\/span>Figure 20).<\/span><\/p>\n Figure 14 Soko Donau on water (Images \u00a9 2008 ZDF and ORF)<\/p>\n Figure 15 arriving at the S\u00fcdbahnhof in I Love Vienna (Images \u00a9 1991 epo-film)<\/p>\n Figure 16 the Beisl in Blutrausch (Images \u00a9 1997 Dor Film Produktionsgesellschaft\/ \u00d6sterreichischer Runkfunk (ORF)<\/p>\n Figure 17 Soko Donau on land (Images \u00a9 2008 ZDF and ORF)<\/p>\n Figure 18 leaving the hotel in the 2nd district in I Love Vienna (Images \u00a9 1991 epo-film)<\/p>\n Figure 19 concert in the Arena (Images \u00a9 1997 Dor Film Produktionsgesellschaft\/ \u00d6sterreichischer Runkfunk (ORF)<\/p>\n Figure 20 irreverent treatment of statue in I Love Vienna (Images \u00a9 1991 epo-film)<\/p>\n However, because these popular culture productions have remained peripheral to Vienna\u2019s high-culture reputation, on which its tourist status as a European capital of culture rests, they have not been able to provide an enticing enough environment to lure Lang back to Vienna from the idyll of Long Island, where he has resided since retiring from fashion and devoting himself to art.<\/span>16\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/span>At least not yet permanently. <\/span>Lang\u2019s most recent solo exhibition, \u201cVarious Conditions,\u201d was in the Stadtraum Gallery in Vienna and the Sammlung Friedrichshof in the Burgenland in the summer and fall of 2017 (http:\/\/www.h-lang.studio<\/span><\/a>), while a Helmut Lang Archive recently opened in Vienna\u2019s Museum of Applied Arts (see Figures 23-26). It is therefore not impossible that he may relocate back to Austria at some point, just as Veruschka returned to Berlin from Brooklyn in the aftermath of 9\/11 with the second Bush presidency.<\/p>\n Urban imaginaries are by no means static constructions. The gentrification Berlin is currently experiencing may eventually undermine its \u201cpoor but sexy\u201d reputation. The Ramones Museum in Berlin is now in its third location and may well end up having to decamp yet again to a more affordable space, either on the city\u2019s periphery or outside the city altogether (Fig. 0-22).<\/span>17<\/a><\/span><\/span> What seems certain at this point is that the likeliness of its moving to Vienna is comparable with the likeliness of Helmut Lang returning to the city\u2014for precisely the same reason: they would not feel comfortable with, or want to be seen as aligned with, the contours and shadings of the faded splendor of Vienna\u2019s imperial imaginary, which still remains largely untouched by the Viennese productions mentioned here and stuck in \u201cthe world of yesterday\u201d (Zweig) that once housed great writers such as Zweig, Wittgenstein, Freud, and Schnitzler, and from which a resistant fashion designer such as Helmut Lang has in the past gone to great lengths to distance himself.18<\/a><\/span><\/span> That Berlin has bought into the understanding of itself as a place in Braidotti\u2019s sense of a set of counter-memories can be seen in its championing of its Bowie connection: the building at Hauptstrasse 154-155, in which Bowie lived during his stay in the city in the 1970s, now has a commemorative plaque on it and the street is now called \u201cDavid Bowie Strasse,\u201d at least on postcards Figure 21). Indeed, given the centrality of the countercultural imaginary of Berlin that attracted Bowie and Slimane in motoring the city\u2019s current gentrification, one has to question in how far it can truly be considered countercultural and not simply imaginary, in the psychoanalytic sense\u2014that is, the realm through which the ego is constituted in a fantasy-driven process of narcissistic identification. What can be concluded is, as has been demonstrated here by illustrating this contribution as lavishly as it has been, no matter how Berlin\u2019s and Vienna\u2019s urban imaginaries continue to evolve, the stylistic index of fashion will be able to help establish their locational relationality.<\/p>\n Figure 21 Flo Hayler in front of the original Ramones Museum location in Kreuzberg (courtesy of Flo Hayler)<\/p>\n Figure 22 a postcard showing a street sign at Hauptstrasse 154\/155, taken in January 2016 by Ute Volz (photo: S. Ingram)<\/p>\n Figures 23-26 images from the newly opened Helmut Lang archive in the basement of Vienna\u2019s MAK\u2014Museum of Applied Arts (photos: S. Ingram)<\/p>\n Allwood. \u201cExclusive: Read Hedi Slimane\u2019s Touching Tribute to Bowie.\u201d Dazed<\/span>. 16 Mar. 2016. 17 Aug. 2016. www.dazeddigital.com\/fashion\/article\/30395\/1\/exclusive-hedi-slimane-s-touching-tribute-to-bowie<\/a>. Accessed 4 Dec. 2018.<\/p>\n Arnold, Rebecca. Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century<\/span>. Rutgers University Press, 2001.<\/p>\n —. \u201cHeroin Chic.\u201d Fashion Theory<\/span>, vol. 3, no. 3, 1999, pp. 279-295.<\/p>\n Bauer, Karin, and Jennifer R. Hosek, eds. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin<\/span>. Berghahn Books, 2017.<\/p>\n Blaagaard, Bolette, and Iris van der Tuin, eds. The Subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts<\/span>. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.<\/p>\n Bowstead, Jay McCauley. \u201cHedi Slimane and the Reinvention of Menswear.\u201d Critical Studies in Men\u2019s Fashion,<\/span> vol. 2, no. 1, 2015, pp. 23-42.<\/p>\n Breward, Christopher. \u201cFor \u2018We Are the Goon Squad\u2019: Bowie, Style and the Power of the LP Cover, 1967-1983.\u201d David Bowie Is the Subject, edited by<\/span> Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh. London: V & A Publishing, 2013, pp. 193\u2013201.<\/p>\n Cullen, Oriole. \u201cChanges: David Bowie\u2019s Life Story.\u201d David Bowie Is the Subject<\/span>, edited by Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, V&A Publishing, 2013, pp. 235-281.<\/p>\n Davis, Johnny. \u201cHedi Slimane: \u2018Maybe I Have to Start Designing Again.\u2019\u201d The Guardian<\/span> 21 Mar. 2011, www.theguardian.com\/lifeandstyle\/2011\/mar\/21\/hedi-slimane-designer-photographer<\/a>. Accessed 13 Mar. 2017.<\/p>\n Felscherinow, Christiane, and Sonja Vukovich. Christiane F. – Mein zweites Leben Autobiografie.<\/span> Berlin: Deutscher Levante Verlag GmbH, 2013.<\/p>\n Gli\u0144ski, Miko\u0142aj. \u201cDid David Bowie Know Esperanto? The Invented Language of Warszawa & the Eastern-European Story Behind It.\u201d Culture.pl<\/span>. 15 Dec. 2016. culture.pl\/en\/article\/did-david-bowie-know-esperanto-the-invented-language-of-warszawa-the-eastern-european-story-behind<\/a>. Accessed 7 Sept. 2018.<\/p>\n \u201cHedi Slimane\u2019s Tribute to David Bowie.\u201d Something About Magazine<\/span>. 13 Jan. 2016. somethingaboutmagazine.com\/hedi-slimanes-tribute-to-david-bowie<\/a>\/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2016.<\/p>\n Ingram, Susan. \u201cTaking a Walk on the Wild Side: Berlin and Christiane F.\u2019s Second Life.\u201d Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin<\/span>, edited by Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek. Berghahn Books, 2018. 53\u201372.<\/p>\n Ingram, Susan, and Markus Reisenleitner. L.A. Chic: A Locational History of Los Angeles Fashion<\/span>. Intellect Ltd, 2018.<\/p>\n —. Wiener Chic: A Locational History of Vienna Fashion<\/span>. Intellect Ltd, 2013.<\/p>\n Ingram, Susan, and Katrina Sark. Berliner Chic<\/span>. Intellect Books, 2011.<\/p>\n Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender<\/span>. New edition. University of Minnesota Press, 1994.<\/p>\n Mavrody, Mika. \u201cSee How These Six Corporations Control the Luxury Fashion Industry.\u201d theFashionSpot<\/span>. 30 Apr. 2014. www.thefashionspot.com\/buzz-news\/latest-news\/401107-at-a-glance-see-how-these-six-corporations-control-the-luxury-fashion-industry\/<\/a>. Accessed 5 Sept. 2018.<\/p>\n Menkes, Suzy. \u201cHedi Slimane: \u2018Ich Bin Ein Berliner.\u2019\u201d The New York Times<\/span> 24 June 2003. NYTimes.com<\/span>. www.nytimes.com\/2003\/06\/24\/news\/24iht-rphoto_ed3_.html<\/a>. Accessed 17 Aug. 2016.<\/p>\n Paumgarten, Nick. \u201cPretty Things.\u201d The New Yorker<\/span> 13 Mar. 2006. www.newyorker.com<\/span>. www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2006\/03\/20\/pretty-things<\/a>. Accessed 23 July 2017.<\/p>\n Quinn, Bradley. \u201c\u2018Radical\u2019 Fashion? A Critique of the Radical Fashion Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.\u201d Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, <\/span>vol. 6, 2002, pp. 441-445.<\/p>\n
\nWhere the Boys Who Keep Swinging Are Now<\/span>: Locational Relationality in Hedi Slimane and Helmut Lang1<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/ingram-image1-239x300.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n(thesartorialist.com)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/ingram-image2-reduced-2-289x300.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41038.png\")
<\/a>![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41047.png\")
<\/a>![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41057.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41068.png\")
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\nI open my birthday present and I meet David for the first time, at the age of seven.
\nDavid Live, recorded in Philadelphia one year before, is about to change my life.
\nMy sister\u2019s best friend, Veronique Jamin, puts the vinyl on my low-fi turntable.
\nVeronique is fifteen, the prettiest thing. She wears a black vinyl jumpsuit and puts blue glitter
\non her eyes.
\nShe plays and sings along: Aladdin Sane.
\nI am used to seeing her dancing, throwing back her beautiful hair, but this time it\u2019s different.
\nThis is about Bowie.
\nI lie down on the bed and observe the double album cover, the powder-blue suspended suit
\nof Freddie Buretti. The pale figure, the heroic posture, the slick electric hair.
\nI look at David. I am not quite sure if it is a boy or a girl.
\nI don\u2019t care. I am the same anyway.
\nFrom this day, 5 July 1975, Bowie will protect me.<\/p>\n
\nThere are about 100,000 people. I am excited and scared at the same time by the raw energy
\nof the crowd.
\nI will never forget how I felt that day.
\nI became a teenager when I walked into that venue.
\nDavid takes the stage: The Jean Genie.
\n100,000 girls and boys like an ocean under a storm.
\nModern Love, and it\u2019s over. I will never be the same.
\nMy life was ahead of me.<\/p>\n
\nI lost my childhood, I lost my youth.
\nNothing will ever be the same. (Allwood) (cf. Victoria and Albert Museum).11<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nTaste has to come from somewhere. Thirty years later, after Slimane has become a celebrated fashion designer who occasionally claims that he has no precedents or influences\u2014who declares, \u201cI have no nostalgia\u201d\u2014he allows that his sensibility owes a lot to \u201cDavid Live\u201d and to the early sight of this cool and cadaverous androgyne striking an angular pose. \u201cWhen you\u2019re a kid, you stare at things like this,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is a moment of isolation in your room\u2014a moment, maybe, of boredom.\u201d There are many things that can contribute to a boy\u2019s sense that another world exists out there, but, in 1974, nothing quite beat album covers, David Bowie, or older girls in blue jumpsuits (Paumgarten).<\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41087.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41096.jpg\")
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<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41119.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41128.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41137.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41147.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41156.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41167.png\")
;<\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41177.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/ingram-image18-1024x698.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41197.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41207.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41239.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Figure](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Image41226.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_0193-1024x768.jpg\")
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\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_0196-768x1024.jpg\")
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\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_0195-768x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/h2>\n