An East Berliner’s lifelong passion for vintage fashion

When Josefine Edle von Krepl fled East Berlin just before the Wall fell in 1989, she managed to save her vast hoard of vintage clothing by wrapping her china and glassware in it.

I used to go to villages and always asked people if they had old clothes and I bought them

The fashion designer, journalist and mother-of-two was allowed to take many of her belongings with her to the West because she claimed she was leaving communist East Germany to marry, she said.

Her request to leave was granted three months before the detested symbol of nearly three decades of suppression was pulled down heralding the promise of an exciting new future of democracy and freedom.

But Edle von Krepl’s lifelong labour of love has been to look to the past through women’s fashion.

She has collected over 5,000 items of clothing dating from 1900 until the end of the 1970s that chart social changes for women, wartime shortages, the advent of US influences and new fabrics.

Edle von Krepl, a flame red-haired 68-year-old with her signature long varnished nails who bears a striking resemblance to French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel, can reel off the provenance and, in many cases, the history of all the clothes.

“As an editor I used to go to villages and always asked people if they had old clothes and I bought them. They were sometimes dirty and had to be restored and cleaned which was complicated,” she told AFP.

“In the GDR (German Democratic Republic) people used to keep a lot. But there was no understanding for (vintage) and people laughed. Of course after the Wall fell everyone wanted only Western things,” she said.

Her passion for vintage fashion was sparked about 55 years ago when, aged 13, Edle von Krepl, who claims not to be fashionable herself, “saved” a black satin dress of her grandmother’s which was due to be thrown out.

Her mother’s elegant 1937 wedding dress in a buttery yellow hue also takes pride of place. “She was a beautiful woman. It was a poor time... but she always wore something chic and red lipstick,” she said.

After many years of hunting for a way to display her collection without being parted from it, the small town of Meyenburg, 140 kilometres (87 miles) north west of Berlin, offered its newly-restored chateau.

About 360 of her items, together with bags, hats, shoes, jewellery and other period accessories, went on view to the public in 2006 at the elegant Modemuseum (Fashion Museum) in the historic building.

Leaving her home city to relocate to the grey, eastern German town was a wrench but the longing for a showcase was stronger and she has now made her home nearby, with her seven cats, in a former vicarage.

“This dress I bought from a woman in Dresden, she’s long since dead..,” Edle von Krepl says of a dress from around 1900 in one of the display cases.

Among a cluster of turn-of-the-century wedding gowns, a black dress stands out. Edle von Krepl explains that poorer women would dress in black to get married so they could wear the dress again.

She then points to a shimmering white tulle dress worn in 1914 by its owner for her engagement which she planned to wear again on her wedding day with a different coloured underlay.

“I was in Hanover doing a show at a fair which was shown on TV and a woman called and said she wanted to give me a dress,” Edle von Krepl said.

“Her fiance went to war and was soon killed, so it never could be a wedding dress. The woman lived on the fourth floor and had trouble walking so I picked her up and brought her to see the show and showed the dress,” she said.

“She wept. She never met anyone else.”