AGLANCE AT the two thick volumes of the 1930 Reichshandbuch der deutschen Gesellschaft (a high-brow, illustrated “Who's Who?” of German society of the late 1920s) will reveal, among the handful of women featured, two representatives of the world of fashion — journalists Ola Alsen and Elsa Herzog. In sharp contrast to all the other photographs in the volume, the studio portraits of Alsen and Herzog show the two women almost full-length; both are stylishly dressed, smile coquettishly at the imaginary audience, and reveal an almost narcissistic pleasure in the spectacle of fashion that they are part of. The photograph of Herzog captures her both in profile and reflected in a mirror, as if she were inspecting her elegant attire: she is holding apart the fur collar of her coat to reveal the soft folds of a shiny evening gown.

In many ways these two fashion writers resemble the film and theater stars featured frequently in the pages of the fashion magazines they edited or contributed to for many years. Indeed, during the 1920s both became media celebrities in the modern sense, embodying, displaying, and performing the styles they wrote about. Alsen was a familiar name to the public as a fashion expert, since she not only wrote regularly for Elegante Welt and other mass-circulation magazines and film periodicals of the time (Moden-Spiegel, Sport im Bild, and Film-Kurier), but she was also known to pose as a model for leading Berlin fashion salons. And Herzog had been a staff writer on fashion for Der Konfektionär since 1893 and was fashion editor for Die praktische Berlinerin, Die Dame, and Die Woche from 1915 to the late 1920s.

In the early days of the fashion press in Germany — in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries — most of the commentators were men, and it was not until around 1900 that an increasing number of women writers started to work regularly for the fashion pages as reporters or editors, signing their names under the articles and quickly becoming popular with the mass reader.