Tag Archives: Fashion School
I had the dream with my drawing talent and sewing background to become a Movie Costume Designer! Inspired from my movie-seeing-experiences, I had a vision of what that place should be like, and after a few places, I found it. I went there by myself after seeing a want-ad in the newspaper. I was there at 8:00 in the morning and waited until 10:00 when the owner finally showed up. The next day my mother went back with me and I signed the paper for a three year contract. I hit the jackpot!
It was a chic but small fashion salon on Berlin’s Grand Avenue, the Kurfürstendamm (called Ku’damm by Berliners). Not only did they make clothes for the rich and famous, but costumes for films also! Once could often see the very famous strolling along the Boulevard, but the greatest was for me when I had to deliver wardrobe to the UFA Studio. It was a 30-minute taxi drive to get there, and often I had to sew on last minute things like buttons. I walked around the studio and watched movie making before I had to take the train back. After three years and a week long examination, I could call myself a seamstress.
From Ursula’s autobiography, Leaving Berlin.
“I had not given up the dream to become a fashion or costume designer and my wonderful parents made it again possible for me to go to the Textil Und Modeschule der Reichshauptstadt Berlin, a college for fashion design and pattern-making.
The only other school like this was in Munich. So, all of a sudden I got to know a totally different breed of girls, rich ones. They came from all over Germany and many of them bragged about their families. I would have been looked down at, so I never talked about my working class background. It bothered me in the beginning, but I had more talent than most of them! That made me feel good. Besides this, I had the best time of my life.
The war was going on already for two years and it got worse. Bombing started almost day and night. One room in our basement was a bomb shelter and we spent many hours there, listening to the airplanes and shooting of our anti aircraft artillery, and hoping the sound of falling bombs didn’t come too close to us.
Then came the time fashion was not important anymore and after one and a half years of studies, the college had to close and we all went to work in factories. Everything to “win the war!” I got a job in a construction office where I copied designs of little parts for airplanes. In the Spring of 1944, the company was destroyed by bombs and relocated 4 hours by train to the east of Berlin, and all of us employees had to move there too.”
From Ursula’s autobiography, Leaving Berlin.
Ursula Grimm 