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October 17, 2008
A career full of beauty
Exhibit shows Lore Wiener's lasting fashion taste.
OLGA LIVSHIN
Lore Maria Wiener is 88. A tiny woman with white hair and an incredibly infectious smile, she fits perfectly in her white house, among her white furniture and white-and-blue porcelain teacups. "I couldn't live anywhere else," she admitted. "I love white."
The only dark color in Wiener's house is provided by bookshelves. Encircling her white living room and filled mostly with brown German titles, they contrast sharply with Wiener's buoyant aura of white and her talent to make everyone around her beautiful. This is not an exaggeration. Wiener is a fashion designer. For more than 60 years, she has followed her calling – making women beautiful.
The new exhibit at the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia, Fashioning Lives: Questions of Identity, which opened on Sept. 18, is dedicated to Wiener and her journey around the world in pursuit of female beauty. Interlaced with Wiener's daughter Claudia Cornwall's search for identity, the exhibit unveils the incredible odyssey of one family through the 20th century.
Wiener's path started in the small town of Bremen in Germany. "I always wanted to be a fashion designer," she recalled. "Since I was 13, I've made all my clothes." She smiled happily. "Once, I came to school in a new, pink dress. It was so beautiful! My teacher told everyone that I sewed it myself. Everyone admired it."
At 16, Wiener left school and apprenticed with a dressmaker. "Each apprentice had to make weekly sketches in her journal," she said. "My mistress liked my journal so much she presented it to the union headquarters in Bremen. They were impressed, too. They sent my journal around Germany, as the best sketching journal in the country."
Wiener was around 17 at the time, but she still remembers the event as one of the joyful highlights of her career. Two years later, when her mentor couldn't teach her anything anymore, Wiener enrolled in a school of fashion design in Vienna. She might have become a European couturier in the same league as Coco Channel and Valentino, if the Nazis' ideology didn't clash with the quirk of her birth – her father was a converted Jew.
In 1940, to escape the escalating fascism in Europe, Wiener followed her father to Shanghai. There, she soon established her own dressmaking atelier. With her inherent gift for beauty and with her Viennese education, she didn't lack for clients. She also fell in love with her future husband – another converted Jew, from Vienna.
Their story resembles a fairy tale: he was a journalist and she came to his newspaper to offer a write-up on her new business. He was smitten with her – a miniature red head with an engaging smile and a lively disposition. A few months later, their whirlwind romance in wartime Shanghai ended in marriage. "It was my Christmas gift to him," she said with twinkling eyes, still cherishing the memory.
After the Second World War ended, they stayed in Shanghai. Young and professionally successful, they prepared to "live happily ever after," but fate interfered. The revolution and civil war that rocked China at that time forced many Europeans to leave. The Wiener family moved to Vancouver.
With her husband's help, Wiener started her design business from scratch in the unfamiliar land. "It was probably my European accent," she said, laughing. "People thought I was better than an American modiste." Her penchant for timeless, elegant designs, her sunny personality and her husband's business acumen probably also contributed to the success of their business.
According to Cornwall, her mother worked for 18 hours a day in that first year. The business grew rapidly, enabling the family to obtain permanent status in Canada. Over the following years, Wiener's work was featured in many local and national publications. Some of her clients stayed with her for decades, valuing her graceful designs and her ability to dress up clients' bodily imperfections.
Cornwall mused that every woman felt taller, slimmer and more desirable in her mom's clothing. And the displays at the Jewish museum confirm the eternal allure of Wiener's silhouettes. Even now, 50 years after their creation, they still look fashionable. Any woman would look good in them, although there is nothing flashy or extravagant there, just good taste and the artist's unerring eye.
The exhibition is small, only a few dresses, photographs and magazine articles. Two of her former clients came to the opening night wearing her designs, which was the best tribute any dressmaker could hope for.
Through all the complexities and tribulations of her life, Wiener has remained unshakably cheerful. "I don't feel that my life was hard," she said. "I had a perfect life and the most wonderful husband. I never met people that were not nice."
She never encountered anti-Semitism either, she said, although her father and husband, who were Jewish, might have attested to the contrary. Living in her effervescent bubble of optimism, she invited only positive emotions in everyone she met, so she saw no reason to tell her daughter about her Jewish connections. Besides, Wiener's husband didn't wish his daughter to know. Consequently, Cornwall grew up "vaguely Christian."
When, at 40, Cornwall found out that three-quarters of her ancestors were Jews, the discovery turned her life upside down. She started digging into the past. As a professional writer, she needed to write about it to better understand her parents and herself. The result of her research was the book Letter from Vienna, published in 1995, in which Cornwall documents her quest to uncover her family's Jewish history.
Cornwall's story forms an intrinsic part of the Fashioning Lives exhibit. It completes the family circle, bringing the secrets out and, finally, concluding the journey around the globe that her mother began all those years ago.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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