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The Nazis had no unified stance on women's fashion. Although the party alternately propagated the "Gretchen look" of the fresh-faced, blond-haired Fraulein in braids with that of the domineering Brunhilde in uniform,1 Nazi officials themselves favored fashionable women whose clothes would have been in vogue in Paris, London, or New York. Like Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of the Third Reich who denounced the "shamelessly eroticized," "whore-led" French fashion industry (Wulf 286) but was married to a woman whose clothes were made by haute couture designers, Hitler preferred slim, well-dressed women despite his public allegiance to Tracht (traditional dress). As historian Irene Guenther has pointed out, when he exchanged marriage vows with Eva Braun, she wore not a dirndl but an elegant gown made by the designers at Annemarie Heise, one of Berlin's premier high fashion houses (Guenther 51). Indeed, just a cursory glance at German fashion magazines of the 1930s and 1940s demonstrates the extent to which German women enthusiastically embraced international fashion trends, turning a deaf ear to official Nazi rhetoric about Aryan dress.
But there was one fashion statement that virtually all Nazis repudiated both publicly and privately, and that was the flapper dress. With its boxy shape that hung straight from the shoulders and fell in an unbroken line to just below the knees, this dress was popular in Germany and elsewhere in the mid to late 1920s in no small measure because its loose cut and short hemline allowed women unprecedented freedom of movement. No longer constrained by corsets and long skirts, nor by the discomfort and time it took to dress oneself in such styles, women in flapper dresses were out and about-at the movies, at the theater, and, especially, at work. It was precisely for this reason that the Nazi party and its officials so emphatically rejected the style beginning in the 1920s. Because it did not show the curves of the female body-indeed, because it looked best on the flat-chested, small-hipped androgyne who has come to typify the freewheeling, emancipated, working "New Woman" of the 1920s-the flapper dress was far less easily reconciled with the Nazi party platform for women of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) than was the formfitting, international haute couture of the 1930s...