Fashion city Amsterdam: from haute couture to street culture

How did Amsterdam evolve into a fashion capital? A question perfectly suited to Ivo Weyel, whose great-grandfather was one of the founders of the fashion house Hirsch & Cie on Leidseplein (1882-1976). The first fashion show ever held in the Netherlands even took place there, featuring French models who were described in the Dutch press as "girls of easy virtue," so completely unknown was the phenomenon.

The year is 1882. My great-grandfather Sylvain Kahn traveled through Europe with his companion Sally Berg, looking for the next step in their lives. They were both just 24, but had already built a joint career at the Brussels fashion house Hirsch & Cie. since they were sixteen. Sylvain came from Alsace, France, and Sally from Warburg, Germany, and both had left home early in search of adventure. At Hirsch, they found the perfect matchSylvain was a fabric expert par excellence with a shrewd business mind, Sally an inventive, artistic, and creative spirit. At twenty-four, they felt it was high time to start their own business together. Leon Hirsch was sad to see them go, but was good-natured enough to lend them money for their own business. So they boarded a train to find a suitable location somewhere in Europe, because that was Leon's condition: not in Brussels! He was terrified of formidable competition from this talented duo. They traveled hither and thither, finding nowhere suitable, until they arrived in Amsterdam, looked around, and found a city that—as Sylvain noted in his inseparable notebook—"is devoid of anything fashionable. The ladies dress in complete disregard of all notions of fashion. Even the rich ladies look as if they've been drenched in mud. It looks like rural China." (What he meant by that last point was never entirely clear to me, especially since he had never been to China.)
Hirsch & Cie at the Leidseplein

Soieries, Châles, Dentelles  

The fact is that fashion didn't really exist in Amsterdam at that time. There were tailors and home seamstresses who copied dresses from pictures, anonymous, label-less gowns. In late nineteenth-century Paris, Charles Frederick Worth was the first designer to name his designs; he was thus the founder of what would later become the current fashion industry. But in Amsterdam, there was nothing like that at all. Until Hirsch arrived. According to these gentlemen, Amsterdam was clearly ready for real Fashion, chic, elegant, and luxurious. They saw an advertisement in the newspaper offering a small corner space on Leidseplein for rent, very cheaply, as Leidseplein was miles away from the other shops in the city, which were mainly located around Nieuwendijk. Was it their foresight that led them to choose this location, or simply because it was cheap? The future would show that this very Leidseplein would grow into the heart of Amsterdam, with the Stadsschouwburg (City Theatre), the American Hotel, and expanding restaurants and bars. They nailed Hirsch & Cie above the door, not because Leon had asked, but out of gratitude for the training they had received from him and, of course, his loan. Sylvain wrote in his diary: "Monsieur Leon could not hold back his tears when he learned of the name we had chosen. Soieries, Châles, Manteaux, Robes, Dentelles, Nouveautés, Ganterie, Parapluies, Ombrelles they had it written in beautiful letters on the facade, partly because Sylvain didn't speak a word of Dutch, partly because French gave it an international and chic cachet; at that time it was still bon ton to use French as the lingua franca in aristocratic circles. Since "ordinary" Amsterdammers didn't speak it, the French words on the facade were abracadabra, making it immediately clear who Hirsch's intended clientele would be.

Democratization of fashion

Fast forward: Hirsch was exactly what Amsterdam had been waiting for. Customers flocked, and business boomed, so much so that Sylvain and Sally were able to build the large, white fashion palace in 1912 that still stands today: nearly 20.000 square meters filled with high-quality clothing, pure haute couture, run by a staff of five hundred men and women. The first fashion show ever held in the Netherlands took place there, featuring French models who were described in the Dutch press as "girls of easy virtue," so completely unknown was the phenomenon. The building still stands and is now partially leased to Apple. A good example should be followed: in Hirsch's wake, other fashion houses followed, such as Maison de Bonneterie, Kühne, and Maison C. Kruysveldt de Mare, all of whom wholesaled expensive haute couture for the elite. With the rise of industrialization and the advent of ready-to-wear, fashion gradually became more accessible to a wider audience. Businesses like C&A and Peek & Cloppenburg brought about the much-needed "democratization" of fashion. A new era had dawned: the guiding principle became affordable fashion for everyone, machine-made, except for a few. While the Brenninkmeijers, the Vromen and Dreesmannen, the Peeks and Cloppenburgs became incredibly wealthy thanks to their branches full of mass-produced fashion, the women of these families didn't shop in their own stores but all became Hirsch customers, because, well, there was still a difference. My grandfather wrote in his memoirs: "Mrs. Brenninkmeijer once asked me not to tell anyone she was our customer, because she was embarrassed not to wear a C&A dress herself. I replied—rather offended—that I didn't need to tell anyone, because everyone immediately saw the difference between a dress from us and one from C&A. Then it was her turn to be offended."
Claes Iversen.

Miniskirt and grunge

While Hirsch was once the leading trendsetter in Amsterdam/Dutch fashion, the driving force behind everything, the city and the country have, to this day, more or less regressed to loyal and quickly adapting followers of international designers and trends. While the Netherlands once played a major role in textiles (think of the large textile factories in the eastern part of the country), this was no longer the case in fashion and trends. London introduced the miniskirt and grunge, the US introduced jeans and Calvin Klein, Milan became a fashion capital with designers like Armani, Versace, and Prada, and Paris remained number one for a very long time. What Amsterdam did excel in, and play an international pioneering role, was secondhand clothing – nothing was hipper than that around the eighties. The Amsterdam shops that wholesaled in it became the city's hippest spots, where the first DJs played and in-crowd parties were organized. It was a trend that was only later adopted in other countries and then used clothing gradually became more chic, and with it the terms used to describe it, from simply second-hand to second-hand to vintage en pre-loved. 

Our great couturiers

Following the example of Paris, where more and more couturiers, following Worth's example, began using their own names—think Lanvin, Paquin, Poiret, and later Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Coco Chanel—this also happened on a smaller scale in Amsterdam. Idiosyncratic Amsterdam designers began making a name for themselves with highly personal and recognizable styles—and, due to their exclusivity, accessible only to a select audience: Max Heymans, Frank Govers, Frans Molenaar, Edgar Vos, and Fong Leng were the pioneers. In Amsterdam, they were considered our great couturiers (initially even known as The Big Three: Heymans, Govers, and Molenaar) and built a decent career during their lifetimes, but they had no international influence whatsoever. These were different times. Some of them did have their own shops, for example, in PC Hooftstraat, but sales primarily came from their private salons (pronounced in French) that also served as their own homes and studios. With their passing, Amsterdam haute couture effectively died, except for Iris van Herpen (although not originally from Amsterdam, she did show for the first time in 2007 during Amsterdam International Fashion Week – formerly Amsterdam Fashion City) and Viktor & Rolf. While Iris's career continues to soar, Viktor & Rolf, after several stellar years on the international circuit (they once claimed to have ambitions to surpass Yves Saint Laurent), are completely out of fashion. On the city's premier fashion shopping street, PC Hooftstraat, with the exception of G-Star, there are no Dutch, let alone Amsterdam, fashion names left. Shoe designer Jan Jansen, internationally regarded as a pioneer and trendsetter, endured the longest with his own store on Rokin. It closed in 2015.

Frans Molenaar.

Fashionable mass brands

Which isn't to say Amsterdam hasn't produced any big names. It's just that they've grown in a different fashion arena, along the lines once pioneered by C&A et al., namely the—albeit much hipper and more fashionable—mass: G-Star, Mexx (founder Rattan Chadha started with a small secondhand clothes shop in Amsterdam), and Scotch & Soda became international major players. But even on a smaller scale, we're not lacking in individual fashion talent: Jan Taminiau (known for Queen Maxima's robes), Ronald van der Kemp (one of the first to create recycled haute couture), Aziz Bekkaoui, Claes Iversen, and a few other talented designers. According to Amsterdam itself, it's far from finished as a fashion capital; this year, the annual Amsterdam Fashion Week will take place again, focusing primarily on new and young designers, hoping to create a larger platform for them internationally.