Bernhard Willhelm: The contemporary and sartorial remembrance

This article employs the theoretical framework of contemporaneity to investigate the practice of German avant-garde fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm. Political philosopher Giorgio Agamben and art historian Terry Smith’s theorizations on the contemporary are examined alongside fashion theorist Ulrich Lehmann’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s concepts of Tigersprung (a tiger’s leap) and Jetztzeit (now-time). Heterogeneity, disjunction and non-linear historical time are concepts manifested through sartorial remembrance in contemporary fashion. To illustrate these ideas, this study focuses on Willhelm’s articulation of contemporaneity through the quotation of folk dress, cross-cultural borrowing and decontextualization. In so doing, a concept of history can be derived, whereby multiple narratives exist simultaneously, merging past, present and future.