Leonie Bauer - a fashion designer from Chemnitz
City archive secures estate
The designer Leonie Bauer, born in 1930, created women's fashion in the GDR. She died in 2018. The Chemnitz City Archive was able to take over and secure 62 drawings and some documents from Leonie Bauer's personal estate at the beginning of 2020. Following conservation and cataloguing work, they are now available to the public for analysis and use.
Would a woman still wear something like this today? This question arises when you look at Leonie Bauer's fashion designs from the sixties. Yes, a woman would! A number of models seem almost timeless and are still relevant today. The designs for dresses, costumes and coats for women and girls were in no way inferior to the work of her international colleagues in terms of creativity, ingenuity and, above all, chic.
Even the fashion magazine "Sibylle" featured the clothes designed by Leonie Bauer several times and published a multi-page portrait of the designer, who grew up on the Kaßberg in Chemnitz, in 1969. The fact that the clothes designed by Leonie Bauer could hardly reach normal GDR women was less due to the creative ideas of the designer, who worked for the Eldamo clothing factory (VEB) in Zwickau from 1959 to 1977, than to the conditions of the socialist planned economy.
Leonie Bauer, whose centre of life was always Chemnitz or Karl-Marx-Stadt, moved from Zwickau to her home town in 1977 and designed gloves in a leather clothing factory in her last years of work. No designs from this period are known to date.
