Chic Parisien Bachwitz (registered as from 1924 and as by 1938) was a Viennese fashion publishing house, active from 1894 until 1958.
It was founded by Arnold Bachwitz (1854–1930) and produced fashion magazines and dress patterns for an international market. Its base was the Palais des Beaux Arts, the building it commissioned in 1908–09 at Löwengasse 47 in Vienna's third district.
The Bachwitz family were Jewish. After the Anschluss in 1938 the company was "Aryanized", and in 1940 its shares passed to the publishing house of the German Labour Front; it was struck off the commercial register in 1958.
History Foundation, 1894–1908 Arnold Bachwitz was born on June 3, 1854 at Neustadt (Dosse) in Prussia and came to Vienna in 1876 as a specialist in fashion. He worked first in the ready-made clothing trade and became a partner in the firm . As early as 1883 he was running a business specializing in women's coats with a partner, and shortly afterwards founded a fashion atelier on the . On regular visits to Paris he followed current trends, which he sold in Vienna under the label "Chic Parisien".
In 1894, alongside that business, Bachwitz founded a fashion publishing house, later known as Chic Parisien. Its first title, , appeared in 1898. It was followed by the magazine Chic Parisien (1898–1929), whose name the house itself came to carry. As the publishing business grew it took extensive premises on several floors of a large new building at Hoher Markt 7, and Bachwitz left in order to devote himself entirely to his fashion journals. He was also director of the Vienna fashion exhibition, held several times around the turn of the century in the halls of the Vienna Horticultural Society.
Bachwitz's journals took the highest awards at exhibitions in Austria and abroad, among them the Paris world exhibition of 1900. He founded the and organized exhibitions for it at home and abroad. The Ministry of Trade appointed him to the advisory council of the commercial statistical service and gave him the title of . He was also awarded the Civil Merit Cross, second class, for humanitarian work during the First World War.
The Palais des Beaux Arts, 1908–1909
Within a few years the Hoher Markt premises were too small. In 1909 Bachwitz bought land in the Löwengasse, in Vienna's third district, and had a palace-like corner building erected there to his own specifications and plans. An extension followed a few years later. The building, at Löwengasse 47 on the corner of Paracelsusgasse, was designed by the architects Anton and Josef Drexler and built in 1908–09. Bachwitz had the words "Chic Parisien", and later "Palais des Beaux Arts", placed above the entrance portal. The façades were lettered "Wien", "London", "New York" and "Paris". According to Payer, the lettering and the golden globes borne by the figures on the corner tower pointed to the international agenda of the building's client.
More than three hundred people worked in the complex, in design, tailoring and sewing, hand-painting, the photographic studio and distribution, and in the printing works in the basement.
, 1918–1939 In October 1918 Bachwitz engaged (born 1882), a columnist of the Neue Freie Presse who lived nearby, as editor-in-chief of the newly founded magazine . Over the next two decades it became one of Austria's leading illustrated magazines. The photography historian has described it as a pioneering project. Comparable illustrated magazines were not founded until the mid-1920s, whereas appeared from the outset in large format and with an aesthetically ambitious presentation. It carried its own art prints and made extensive use of modern photography.
The magazine appeared monthly, every two weeks from 1923, and monthly again from the early 1930s. It was sold in bookshops, tobacconists and newsstands, and was laid out in coffee houses, hotels and guesthouses as well as in sanatoria and spa establishments.
Its contributors included Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hermann Hesse and Sigmund Freud. Hirschfeld was supported by the journalist and fashion writer (1875–1953), an established figure in Vienna's artistic and coffee-house circles. Writing under the pseudonym "Eva", she ran the magazine's twenty-page fashion supplement for its first three years. Payer describes her as a pioneer in the previously male-dominated genre of fashion journalism. She treated dress in a wider cultural-historical and economic frame, and returned repeatedly in her ironic columns to the changing of gender roles. She left in the summer of 1922 for the Prager Presse.
The literary critic Julian Sternberg, Hirschfeld's colleague at the Neue Freie Presse, wrote for the magazine from 1921, publishing some two hundred reviews over six years under the heading . Humorous material came from a group of largely young graphic artists and illustrators. Photographs came from the leading Viennese studios of the day, and above all from Madame d'Ora, whose work appeared in almost every issue. Younger women working in fashion photography, among them Trude Fleischmann, Kitty Hoffmann, Edith Glogau and Edith Barakovich, found a platform in its pages.
Hirschfeld left the magazine in 1926. In 1927 Bachwitz was named in the imprint as proprietor, publisher and responsible editor alike. During the same volume year he sold it to the Viennese publisher , and from 1929 the Adolf Luser Verlag issued it from Berlin, although it was still printed in Vienna.
Alexander Schilling-Schletter, named as responsible editor under Luser in 1930, appears in 1931 as proprietor, publisher and editor in his own name. Later that year the magazine passed to a company of its own name, with Schilling-Schletter as editor-in-chief. In 1935 its imprint named , secretary-general of the Fatherland Front, as the magazine's director.
Its issue for April 1938, published within weeks of the Anschluss, opened with a full page carrying a swastika and a portrait of Hitler beneath a statement signed by the magazine's editorship. The statement welcomed the annexation and described the magazine as presenting topical material "as a German fashion magazine" for the first time in its twenty-year existence. It ceased publication at the end of 1939.
The picture gallery Bachwitz was a patron of the Künstlerhaus and an active art dealer. In the years before his death he attached to the company a picture gallery occupying several rooms of the building. His obituary called it the and described it as the largest permanent selling exhibition of paintings in Vienna, through which numerous Austrian artists were supported.
The gallery traded under the building's own name, its catalogue appearing as with the French form Palais des Beaux Arts as a running head. It advertised a permanent exhibition of oil paintings and watercolors by leading masters, with free admission and fixed catalogue prices, and gave its holdings as some 2,000 items.
The gallery was at first a separate business registered to Bachwitz personally, until his art publishing license passed to the company in January 1925.
On Bachwitz's seventy-fifth birthday in 1929, and again in its notice of his death the following year, the trade journal credited him with having stimulated the Viennese art market by creating the selling gallery.
The catalogue's foreword states that the gallery showed works by outstanding artists at home and abroad, and of Vienna and Austria in particular, but that the extremely modern tendencies had been excluded. Foreign art was represented by German, Italian and French works. Artists shown included Friedrich Gauermann and the British painter Luke Fildes, as well as Rudolf von Alt.
Ownership and board, 1924–1938 In 1924 the company was registered as , of Löwengasse 47. Its board then included Arnold Bachwitz as president, Alexander Byk, Willy Lebach and Adolf Strel. Alexander Byk had taken over the direction of the then still very small company around 1900. He was its vice-president and general director until his sudden death in October 1933. By that year Adolf Strel was signing as president.
Arnold Bachwitz died in November 1930. At his grave the company's board, its atelier, its works council and its commercial staff each sent a speaker. The company's 20,000 shares passed to a number of people whom the City of Vienna's later restitution report declined to name on data-protection grounds.
By 1938 the board consisted of Rosine Bachwitz, Egon Byk (Alexander Byk's son), Willy Lebach, Adolf Strel and Alice Strel. Grete Lebach was entered on the management board on January 11 of that year. A company report drawn up in October 1939 lists the shareholders as Arnold Bachwitz's widow Rosine Bachwitz, their daughter Alice Strel and the estate of their daughter Grete Lebach.
"Aryanization", 1938–1939 The company had been in serious financial difficulty since 1937, which its own board described as the worst year in its existence. The Anschluss cost it a further 30 percent of its export premiums, as the German market closed to it.
The Bachwitz family were Jewish, and most of the company's administrative board fell under the Nuremberg Laws. After the Anschluss both the publishing house and the building were "Aryanized". Decrees of April 1938 created the legal basis for the seizure of Jewish property. The , established the following month under , supervised and carried out such transfers and set the purchase price itself. Even those sums, far below actual value, were in part withheld against supposed tax arrears and levies. The Vermögensverkehrsstelle ordered the appointment of Ernst Kuhn as commissarial manager of the company, to carry through negotiations that lasted some eighteen months.
The entire board was replaced between 1938 and 1939. A register notice of May 11, 1938 recorded the deletion of all six members, among them Rosine Bachwitz and her daughters, and the entry of six new ones, among them the printers Friedrich Jasper and Alfred Leithe-Jasper. Both men had been among the mourners at Arnold Bachwitz's funeral in November 1930, and Friedrich Jasper's firm had printed for the company in 1923.
In November 1938 the firm sent a collection of 45 of its fashion magazines to the City of Vienna at the instigation of the Vermögensverkehrsstelle, in connection with a planned takeover. The shares were at first to go to the Jasper printing house. In May 1939, however, the Vermögensverkehrsstelle annulled that contract and approved a takeover by the publisher instead. As a result, Luser and Kuhn were appointed to the board, each with independent authority to represent and sign for the company.
The German Labour Front and the Wiener Weltmode-Verlag, 1940–1945 On November 4, 1940 a shareholders' meeting resolved the purchase of the company's 20,000 shares. It was chaired by Heinz Brüggen, managing director of the publishing house of the German Labour Front. That publishing house thereby became the company's owner. The existing supervisory board was compelled to resign, and a new one was elected, composed entirely of Germans from the Reich. Later the same month Luser was removed from the management board; in Schwarz's account he had evidently been intended only to prepare the takeover. Waldemar Arndt and Ludwig Fehrle were appointed in his place.
The company was renamed Wiener Weltmode-Verlag; the change was entered in the commercial register in June 1941. Its registered business was widened well beyond fashion publishing. A letter from the Vienna Chamber of Commerce recorded that the firm had been charged with carrying out measures of an educational-political character in the field of fashion, within the Labour Front's cultural and economic program.
In September 1941 the company was converted into a limited liability company. From 1943 until the end of the war the Labour Front's publishing house was the company's sole shareholder.