Aris Kafantogias: Finally liberated! The emergence of Viennese fashion

16.12.2024

What women should wear was intensely debated in early 19th century Vienna. The city’s dressmakers strove to advertise their products and establish a consumer base for them. Thus, in 1816 Johann Schickh founded the first Viennese fashion magazine to promote a ‘Viennese fashion’, women should follow.

The ‘Wiener Moden-Zeitung’ was the first Viennese fashion magazine. It was founded in 1816 as a weekly publication by Johann Schickh, a tailor and man of letters. After a few months, the magazine was published twice a week, then gradually up to five times a week until its end in 1849.[1] The ‘Wiener Moden-Zeitung’ was evidently a successful undertaking on account of its longevity and increase in publication. The magazine addressed middle-class or bourgeois women, who could afford at least the quarter-year presubscription of fifteen Gulden W.W. It likewise circulated among the provincial bourgeoisie in the Austrian Empire, and did not give much space to male fashion. 

The entire article by Aris Kafantogias can be read on the blog of “fernetzt - Junges Forschungsnetzwerk Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte”: 
https://fernetzt.univie.ac.at/20241215-2/ 

Detail from an engraving in the first issue of the "Wiener Moden-Zeitung". Source: ANNO.