The Thickets of Long Ago

"Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past,"
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940

Eugene Corbin - French camouflage - 1914
via Complex

Mela Koehler - Wiener Werkstaette fashion illustration - 1910-4
via The Blue Lantern

Unknown artist - French camouflage prototypes - 1914

Monuments of a Historical Consciousness

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years.” 

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940
quoted in Roger Griffin, A Fascist Century, 2008

F.T. Marinetti and Thayaht

Perpetual Indecision

"The unity of life and art that aesthetic culture aimed at, instead of lifting life to the sublime, transcendent realm of art by giving form to its contingencies and necessity to its trivialities, actually imbued art with its own dilettante hedonism. In sum, aesthetic culture pulled art down to its own level, the petty, ramshackle realm of perpetual indecision."

Georg Lukács, Aesthetic Culture, 1910

Unknown Photographer
From left to right: Emil Hesse Burri, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Wilhelm Speyer and Marie Speyer - Le Lavandou - 1931