overalls and silk dress

By MARIA WIESNER, photos: JULIA ZIMMERMANN

October 2, 2022 · Grit Seymour got to know the fashion industry in the GDR from all angles.

Now the film "In a country that no longer exists" is reminiscent of scenes from that time when not everything was gray and clunky by far.

Grit Seymour clearly remembers one of the most absurd scenes of her life: it was in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s.

She was sitting on the bench in a subway station waiting for the train.

She was in the city for fashion shoots, during the day she worked in the production of a clothing company, in the evenings and at weekends she drove to Berlin and stood in front of the camera as a model.

The result of such a recording now hung on the wall directly behind her.

A larger than life fashion poster with her face looking down.

The situation was absurd because the young woman should not have been in Berlin at the time.

"I was persona non grata in Berlin and knew I wasn't supposed to be here, but there's a huge photo of me hanging there," she says.



She laughs when she talks about it today.

We arranged to meet at her apartment.

She now lives in Berlin again, after long periods in London, Milan, New York and Tokyo.

She still looks like the glossy photos that were taken in the mid-1980s for the magazine "Sibylle" - the "Vogue" of the GDR.

Grit Seymour is tall, slim, blonde and moves with the precision of a dancer or a trained model.

On this hot summer day she wears a sleeveless dress, the cut is straight, the color a hypnotic purple.

Its elegance is reminiscent of the designs that Seymour came up with as creative director at Hugo Boss around the turn of the millennium.

But it was a long way from East Berlin to get there.

Grit Seymour makes a coffee and talks.

Why she was banned from Berlin as a young woman in the GDR – that had to do with the “Swords to Ploughshares” movement and some friends.

Grit Seymour, born in 1966, got to know the peace movement, which is supported by the Protestant Church, in her home town of Halle (Saale), where she did her Abitur.

“One day there was a police car, a Barkas van, in front of the school.

I had my 'swords in ploughshares' sign on my parka, so I quickly threw my sweater over it and thought to myself: I don't want to be arrested today.” Seymour eluded the police, as did some of her friends.

After their arrest, they were deported to West Berlin, but Seymour stayed in touch with them.

By then she had already started her studies at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin-Weißensee and had been discovered as a model.

She had come with her mother to the art school's open house, which coincided with the annual senior fashion show.

The show went and didn't go.

"Someone rushed up to me and said: We lost a model, can you step in?" She could and wanted to.

And because there were not only professors in the audience, but also editors from the fashion magazine "Sibylle", Seymour, with her natural liveliness, was quickly hired for fashion shoots.



Since training came before studying in the workers' and farmers' state, Seymour learned the tailoring trade at the quality fashion label Exquisit, the luxury brand of the GDR.

She went dancing in Berlin at night, straight from the club to the production shift at six.

Sometimes she slept half a day in the rest room.

At the weekend she walked fashion shows and stood in front of the camera for photo shoots.

At some point, when she had already started her studies in Weißensee, her school friends who had been deported to the West got in touch again.

They met in summer in Hungary or Czechoslovakia, where entry was possible.

"These meetings were observed, I later found that out in my Stasi file, so that afterwards I almost got the impression that it was also staged."

Formerly a model in the GDR, today a fashion professor in Berlin: Grit Seymour

The friend from West Berlin had Western products for her: a record by Nina Hagen, books by Max Frisch and Erich Fromm, an issue of the magazine "Spiegel".

“On my return journey, the train was stopped at the border and they came right up to me.

No one else on the train was checked.

I had to unpack and was taken away for interrogation.” What happened next was fit for film.

An interrogation until late at night.

Eventually they let her go.

A car abandoned them in the woods, somewhere on the border.

She walked through the forest until she came to a road, walked along this road to a town and eventually found a phone booth there.

She called a cab.

"It was the first time in my life that I recognized the value of money, because I had 100 marks in my pocket, which was a lot for the time.

That was a big part of my student money,

earned through modelling.” We continued by taxi in the direction of Berlin to the next major train station.

There she slipped into a waiting car and slept through the rest of the night.

In the morning she returned to the capital by train.

But that was not the end of the adventure.

"Someone rushed up to me and said: We've lost a model, can you step in?"

GRIT SEYMOUR

"When I arrived at the university, there was a lot of fanfare with appeals.

I would have allied myself with enemies of the state.

It was like running the gauntlet.” In the end, she is exmatriculated.

Her professor ensures that she can rehabilitate herself in production and continue to work as a model.

So she ends up in Mühlhausen, sews piped pockets for VEB Jugendmode in shift work on the assembly line.

At the weekend she secretly travels to Berlin to take fashion photos and then one evening finds herself in front of her own poster, although she is not supposed to be in the city.

Aesthetics and beauty: Claudia Michelsen (left) and Sven-Eric Bechtolf design fashion for the GDR in the film.

Photo: Ziegler Film / TOBIS

During this time, she also met Aelrun Goette while modeling. With her film "In a country that no longer exists" (from October 6th in German cinemas), she created a memorial to this not only fashionably wild time shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall puts.

The film follows young Suzie (Marlene Burow) in the late 1980s.

Suzie is discovered by chance as a model for "Sibylle", gets to know the fashion scene in the GDR and walks in high heels.

When she is caught with banned books, she has to go into production.

Stands at the workbench in oil-smeared boiler suits by day and on the catwalk in silk dresses by night.

The director captures the contradictions of both worlds, for example staging a fashion shoot directly in the production halls, showing that in the working-class and peasant state there was an entire branch of industry that dealt with aesthetics and beauty and produced clothes that the prejudice in the East everything was gray, clumsy and uniform, give the lie.

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Video: Trailer/TOBIS

And it shows that alongside the officially endorsed aesthetics, there was a lively underground scene in East Berlin, which the scarcity of materials spurred on to bold designs made from all sorts of discarded and unfashionable things.

Rudi (Sabin Tambrea) is the king of this realm.

The ethereal young man designs wedding dresses for dark city elves out of shower curtains and the plastic wrap of unused body bags.



Grit Seymour is responsible for these costumes.

Together with her students from the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW), where she teaches fashion as a professor, Seymour designed the pieces, all of which were inspired by real avant-garde clothes of the time.

The Berlin students also used the unrelated materials that Suzie and Rudi collect in factories in the film.

For one design, unused body bags from pathology were actually used.

“In a country that no longer exists”: Sabin Tambrea (left) and Marlene Burow (right) have big dreams.

Photo: Ziegler Film /TOBIS

Grit Seymour knows what to look out for when designing films, having experienced both the avant-garde scene in East Berlin and the fashion standards of the magazine "Sibylle" herself.

She still raves about the quality of the exquisite fashion today.

“It was about clarity, beauty, reduction, high quality.

The pieces were durable and timeless.” To prove it, she pulls two pieces from her own closet.

A raincoat with trench coat elements and a gray dress made of Japanese silk emblazoned with stars.

"What was shown in the 'Sibylle' should also invite something to dream about," she says.

"The dreary sides of everyday life were faded out a bit."

In East Berlin at that time there was a lively underground scene alongside the “official” aesthetics.

But what happened to her after she was exmatriculated from the university?

She debated whether to leave the country.

When friends had a study group from West Berlin visiting, they went to the Berliner Ensemble together.

“After the screening we were in the canteen together, sitting at a long table, I at the front.

Then I thought: This is my chance now.

I gathered all my courage and spoke in a clear voice to the group.

I asked: Is there anyone here who would marry me to get out of here?

Then there was silence for a moment.

Two got in touch and said, 'Yes, we would, but we have to talk to our friends first.'”



With one, the friend voted against, with the other she was willing to help.

“Somehow he pushed it through, he also wanted to write a book about the whole story at the time.

So he always came to East Berlin with his French girlfriend, and she had to walk 15 meters behind us to make it look like we were a couple.” It was to be almost three years before the application to leave the country because of the “marriage” has been approved.

Claudia Michelsen plays the "Sibylle" boss Elsa Wilbrodt.

Photo: Ziegler Film /TOBIS

When she got the permit in 1988, it was only valid for a few hours.

She went home, packed a few things, said goodbye to her mother and left for West Berlin.

When she enrolled at the University of the Arts in West Berlin to study fashion, the students there were on strike.

So she went to London and graduated from the renowned design school Central Saint Martins College.

She later worked for Max Mara and Donna Karan in New York.

From 1999 she built up the women's fashion line for the men's fashion brand Hugo Boss.

The German press celebrated her in portraits from those years – and was surprised that this woman from the East “outperformed the designers from the West”.



Grit Seymour has been passing on her fashion knowledge to students since 2006, first for six years at the University of the Arts and since 2016 as a fashion professor at the HTW Berlin, for which she initiated creative projects such as the design of the film costumes.

How much work went into researching the costumes can be guessed from the numerous illustrated books that Seymour heaves onto the round table in the kitchen during the conversation.

Iconic fashion shots by GDR photographer Ute Mahler and images of the avant-garde scene in Berlin.



In the film, the boss of the "Sibyl" teaches the young Suzie before a fashion show: "Beauty is a promise that there is something beyond mediocrity where calm reigns." Every single costume in the film fulfills this promise.

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