Black, red & gold – ever since Germany hosted the Football World Cup in 2006, the German flag has been en vogue again. Eva Gronbach took this even further. With miniskirts and handbags in Germany's national colors, the Cologne-based fashion designer demonstrated just how glamorous having a sense of pride in one's own country can be. Thus, Gronbach's collections have names such as “mother earth father land” or “Declaration of love to Germany.” Her trademark: the German federal eagle.
With her “Germany” fashion concept, the wild child has generated a great deal of attention in the media. She repeatedly sparks heated public debate as she finds innovative ways to place national symbols in a fashion context. In doing so, Gronbach has obviously hit a nerve in today's society. She has provided wardrobes for hosts from the music video channel MTV; her designer pieces have become a worldwide hit. As early as 2000, she became the first female fashion designer in Germany to trigger a downright wave of new trends. In this way, Gronbach has made a significant contribution to the gradual change in the nation's self-conception.
The 37-year-old adamantly strives to promote awareness amongst her generation about roots and establish a new sense of identity. She therefore stands for the creation a new, positive image of Germany. The impulse for this is rooted in her own personal background. After completing her training as a tailor, she went abroad in the mid 90s, as she considered Germany to be “too gray and boring.” She studied fashion design at renowned fashion schools in Paris and Brussels. Afterwards, Gronbach worked for designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and John Galliano as well as labels such as Hermès in London and Paris. Yet while she was abroad, she increasingly began to consider her own roots: “I missed Germany: the culture, the language, the people and extremely trivial things like lebkuchen gingerbread cookies,” the designer has said. Eventually, she left the shiny world of glamour behind and opened a little shop of her own in Cologne.
Her first collections, which dealt with the concepts of “home” and “roots,” gave her impulses for new ideas. With the collection “Glück auf,” (the traditional miners’ greeting) for example, Eva Gronbach tackled a part of German industrial history. To this day, she uses old coal miners' uniforms as her base material, which she gets from places such as the former coal mine “Sophia Jacoba" near Aachen. The original pieces of clothing are first cleaned and then reworked. Each piece has its own story to tell, to which the employee numbers printed on the workers' clothing attest. “The miners' uniforms are so candid and authentic,” the designer says: “Just like the residents of North Rhine-Westphalia and, especially, the Rhineland. These people inspire me. They are rooted here yet, at the same time, they are open to new things.”
On the flooding wave of globalization, this rediscovered inclination towards loving one's homeland has become a downright international trend, Gronbach concludes, a phenomenon that can be observed all over the world. More and more of the fashion industry's rising stars are focusing on the concepts of “origins” and “roots.” Eva Gronbach sums it up in modern fashion terminology: “Locality meets lifestyle”.