The opportunities for assimilation offered

Thus the opportunities for assimilation offered by these avant-garde dresses, the sartorial emblems of an elite high culture, were complicated by the simple fact that the items appealed to a very small clientele. The complex phenomenon of assimilation depended on strategies of disappearance, invisibility, and naturalization, which modernist fashion would not have facilitated. To display a Floge or Werkstatte dress would have been perceived as an unusual act in obvious conflict with typical vestimentary practices. The woman who purchased and wore one of these radical designs would have been viewed as avant-garde, but she would not have blended in and, consequently, would not identify or be identified with the secular, non-Jewish cultural community. We might be tempted to interpret this attempt at non-conformity as an articulation of the wearer's irreducible and anarchic singularity, conjecturing that the display of exceptional clothing functioned as a solitary gesture of self-definition. Certainly the decision to assume garments so recognizably unlike other dresses seen in the Viennese urban landscape would have seemed an act of defiance, a bold rejection of conventional norms. However, if actually donning modernist designs marked the wearer as visibly different from most Viennese women, it is significant that she would also be perceived as similar to those women who did wear these clothes. While she may not have adhered to the fashions worn by most Viennese, nonetheless she exhibited a taste in clothing that was, importantly, shared by other women. Wearing a design created by the Floge salon or the Wiener Werkstatte created ties to a group that existed alongside and in opposition to the normative fashion world, a realm populated primarily by the Jewish bourgeois women who chose to promote modernist art practices. From this perspective, the use of avant-garde fashion would enable an identification with like-minded, similarly situated Jewish women, an anti-assimilationist strategy that would seem not to have facilitated acculturation but to have promoted a Jewish collective identity.

This communal strategy can perhaps be better understood if one remembers that the dream of assimilation was at its best a flawed one and, around 1910, the Viennese Jewish community was beginning to doubt its benefits. This loss of faith stemmed in part from the unanticipated effects of assimilation itself. Often, bourgeois Jews were so eager to meld with the dominant culture that they began to be perceived as more Viennese than the Viennese and, therefore, as different. Furthermore, towards the turn of the century, Jews began to dominate the very liberal, elite culture into which they had hoped to disappear. By 1914, Jewish participation in this realm eclipsed that of non-Jews; Jews were assimilating into a Jewish world. The failure of assimilation, however, was not brought on simply by the paradoxical nature of skillful acculturation. Jews had always struggled with persistent antisemitic sentiments, even after the liberal reforms of 1867. Nonetheless the Jewish bourgeoisie had remained hopeful that they could not only integrate, but fully assimilate into Viennese society. Faith in assimilation became increasingly difficult to sustain, however, as antisemitism strengthened towards the end of the century, and it began to rapidly disintegrate when the explicitly antisemitic Christian Socialist government came to power in 1897. Religious identity could no longer be casually suppressed under an administration in which classification as a Jew or non-Jew became a mandatory and public process.