Fashion dictators

With his new film, Comrade Couture, and a label of the same name, the former model Marco Wilms pays tribute to one of East Germany's forgotten movements.

The former East German model Marco Wilms's work as a filmmaker is often marked by his fashion experience. His previous film, Tailor Made Dreams, is about an Indian-born, Bangkok-based dressmaker who dreams of becoming a movie star.

Issardas Sachdev, who liked to sing to customers in his small workshop in Bangkok, was flown to Europe to make the film, all but making his dreams come true. "In his heart, finally for him, he was a Bollywood star," explained Wilms recently in Berlin, where he was presenting his new film, Comrade Couture. In it, Wilms documents his experience as part of East Berlin's underground fashion world - he was the closest thing the German Democratic Republic had to a top model.

Made in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, the film came about when Wilms decided to look up his old friends from the Bohemian fashion movement Chic, Charmant und Dauerhaft (Chic, Charming and Long-Lasting). The group formed in 1984 and was later renamed Allerleirauh. It last met about the time the Wall came down, in 1989. The film tells the story of this colourful and talented group of individuals is both highly amusing and at times quite sad. East German authorities deemed the group "subversive".

"If there was something lively in the GDR, it was always destroyed," said Wilms. "It crippled us." Premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, Comrade Couture (Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie in German) was released in Germany on April 23 with much fanfare. It has not only resonated with Berlin's permanent love affair with all things weird and wonderful, but it also spawned a fashion label of the same name.

The label is set to launch officially at Berlin Fashion Week next month. Although these former Eastern Bloc designers' clothing will be for sale, their motto evokes a time when that wasn't possible: "Comrade Couture: fashion you can't buy, but which everyone can make for themselves." In the group's heyday, the Stasi (the East German secret police) wanted it banned. They argued that if the general public could not buy the clothing then it should not be on display. In response to this, the designers began throwing patterns into the audiences during their shows.

In his former youth club, now a trendy bar, Wilms recalls how he was discovered in a basement disco. He was wearing his favourite piece of clothing: a leather jacket that is featured several times in the film. A few days later, he was asked to do his first catwalk show. The scene is one of the highlights of the film. "They gave me a suit to wear and told me to get on the catwalk," he says. "I had no idea what to do, so I just looked at the girls. The booker went crazy. After that, I just walked out like a robot."

Other entertaining moments include the group's fashion show in Halle, East Germany, which featured clothing made from plastic bin bags worn by models performing robotic dance moves to electronic music. When he was making the film, Wilms checked the Stasi files held on the group. "We were labelled negative and decadent," he says. "Decadent was a real insult." Most of Wilms' contemporaries were forced to take menial day jobs to avoid going to prison, but modelling was considered a respectable career by the authorities. "We were supposed to show the industry how clothing should look," Wilms says. "But nobody could produce it. There were no materials and no machines. It was a dream world."

For other members of the group, which included the designer Sabine von Oettingen and the stylist and former model Frank Schaefer, fashion was a way of expressing their creativity in a society that tried to stifle anything outside of the norm. "In a dictatorship, you are supposed to behave yourself in a certain way," Wilms says. "Parallel universes are created in the midst of this. Ours was the fashion world. It was like a fantasy world and also an ideal world, because you didn't have to sell anything. "

Wilms says he made the film to record a moment in time that might otherwise have disappeared altogether. "It wasn't all that easy," he says. "There was a lot of resistance and I discovered a lot of secrets. It isn't for no reason that there has been nothing made about this scene." He also wanted to give face to a group of people who, he says, felt worthless. "I made the film out of sadness that these people felt like losers," he says. "They all wondered who would give two hoots about their story. I wanted the people that fascinated me and most interested me to be seen. I wanted to travel back like in a time machine and have this feeling again."

In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Wall, an article that appeared in the West German magazine Stern looked set to launch some of the designers' careers in the West. Von Oettingen, who won a prestigious prize that year, went to Paris to take part in a Nina Ricci show and landed a job at a Munich-based fashion house. Described by Wilms as the "super evangelist" of East German fashion, Von Oettingen's reaction was troublesome. "She cut up the fur coats into little pieces," Wilms says. "She didn't want to be that. They didn't want to make anything for a brand. There was something about the society that made people self destructive."

Von Oettingen is a larger-than-life, fun-loving character in the film. She splashes about in the mud for a shoot to show off some of her outlandish, Medieval-themed designs. "Having five children is the secret to my happiness," she beamed at the film's party in Berlin. She now sells her theatrical designs on www.takelage.com. Wilms never quite fitted in with the official culture of the GDR and left East Berlin two months before the Wall fell. After seeing the spectacle unfold on television and Trabi cars in the streets of West Berlin, he headed back to his old apartment and began studying film as if he had never been gone.

He now lives permanently in the former West Berlin, but his parents live in Lichtenberg, a distant part of former East Berlin filled with high-rises. "They were happy with their children and their small house," he says. "It was not important to them that there were watchtowers." Wilms's experience growing up in East Germany continues to influence his work. "We East Germans are now a generation without a home," he says. "It has been West Germans making films about us. The best thing I can do is to make a film and to try and bring back these people's identities."