Vienna may not be synonymous with fashion like its metropolitan counterparts Paris and Milan, but it is a fashionable city, one that historically has been structured by changing fashions and fashionable appearances. Like the Litfaßsäule in Orson Welles’s 1949 urban noir masterpiece  The Third Man , into which Harry Lime escapes in order to avoid capture and which hapless visitors today presume are merely surfaces for advertising, there are many overlooked aspects of Vienna’s distinct style and attitude. By focusing on fashion,  Wiener Chic  narrates Vienna’s history through an interpretation of the material dimensions of Viennese cultural life―from architecture to arts festivals to the urban fabric of street chic. The first book that connects Vienna and fashion with urban theory,  Wiener Chic  draws on material that is virtually unknown in an English-language context to give readers an insider’s vantage point on an underappreciated European fashion capital. "The book that Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner have coauthored is a masterpiece which isn’t afraid to own up to its scholarly rigor. Equally satisfying to the coffee table book skimmer as it will be to the serious student of fashion and history, Wiener Chic: a Locational History of Vienna Fashion is a book that attempts to expose the preconditions of history which have given rise to the dynamism of Vienna fashion." ― Insights Magazine   Susan Ingram is associate professor of humanities at York University. Wiener Chic A Location History of Vienna Fashion By Susan Ingram, Markus Reisenleitner Intellect Ltd Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78320-184-6 Contents List of Illustrations, Preface, Introduction: Vienna's Culture of Appearance, Part I: Chic Formations: The Cinematically Historical Underpinnings of Vienna's Urban Imaginary, Chapter 1: Baroque Chic: Fashioning Courtly Spaces, Chapter 2: Ringstrasse Chic: Vienna Moderns, Chapter 3: Prolo Chic, Chapter 4: ITL[Ausländer]ITL Chic, Part II: Staging Fashion in Vienna, Chapter 5: Museum Chic, Chapter 6: Designer Chic, Conclusion: Vienna Now, Not Never, References, Filmography, CHAPTER 1 Baroque Chic: Fashioning Courtly Spaces The Habsburgs come to town: Establishing Vienna's baroque imaginary "When I walk along the Ring I always get the feeling that a modern Potemkin has wanted to create, in the visitor to Vienna, the impression of a city exclusively inhabited by nobles." (Adolf Loos, cited in Stewart 78) Vienna's global imaginary might be shaped by the imperial grandeur that is part of its baroque legacy, but Vienna was not always a court city. Nor has it ever been a court city like any other. As the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, it hosted, for several centuries, the largest court in the European realm (Kauffmann 31), and that court determined the city's character more intensively and for a longer period of time than is true of other European court cities, whether London, Paris, St. Petersburg, or Madrid; only in the Istanbul of the Ottomans do we find something of comparable length and impact. The Habsburg legacy in Vienna is complex and motivates our decision to translate the designation Residenzstadt as court city rather than imperial city. The Driver and Gilbert edited collection Imperial Cities, which explores "the role of imperialism in the cultural history of the modern European metropolis" (Driver and Gilbert 3), is indicative of the tendency in contemporary, especially postcolonial, scholarship to focus on the colonial empires of the modern period rather than their ancient, medieval or early modern predecessors. Vienna's Habsburg heritage seamlessly bridges the city's pre-modern and modern pasts and requires a designation that sidesteps the danger of reducing that heritage to its baroque glory. One can see this tendency to blend the pre-modern and modern in the exhibition that Diana Vreeland spearheaded at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 1979 to August 1980 on "Fashions of the Hapsburg [sic] Era: Austria-Hungary." The catalogue of the exhibition opens with an essay by Joseph Wechsberg on the "Glory of Vienna" that, in turn, opens with "[t]he oldest known relic, a small figure of a woman, known as 'Venus of Willendorf' [that] was found northwest of Vienna [... and] is believed to date from the Old Stone Age, from about 20,000 BC [sic]" (Cone 21). Wechsberg proceeds to rattle off the city's accomplishments but soon finds himself caught up in the city's legendary taste culture. Vienna's past becomes a blur of music and bonhomie à la Musner: "Even in those days the Viennese liked music and celebrations. The city became known as a place for good living. Many nobles 'stayed much longer than their affairs demanded.' Same as today" (21). The days in question refer to Ottokar II's occupation of the city in the thirteenth century, but one sees how easily the city's courtly traditions can be dehis