Hot summer. Sometime in the 1970s. Everything is sweating. Only grandma and mother aren’t so bad. Because they have a hint of almost nothing on them. Just panties and bra and an apron with no sleeves. Usually with a pretty floral pattern in the most colorful colors. And always made of a wafer-thin fabric called Dederon, a GDR portmanteau for a polyamide fiber whose properties are similar to Western nylon: robust and cheap, easy to care for and wrinkle-free, and extremely quick-drying.
The apron was practical if you wanted to keep the underneath clean. Just because of the patch pockets for tissues, sweets, keys or lipstick. And no lint ever got stuck. She was socially accepted; no woman had to be embarrassed in the proletarian garment.
During the GDR era, many women (not all) of all ages wore this apron as an extremely practical uniform for all household chores, but also in childcare facilities (there were children’s aprons), in shops and in many companies. This was shown recently Berlin exhibition with pictures of the Photographer Helga Paris, who liked to go into production during the GDR era to portray female workers. For example, in the mid-1980s in an East Berlin textile factory: everyone wore aprons while posing confidently in front of the camera.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German women no longer wore their aprons “made in GDR”. Some bought West German copies of the first Westgeld because they were supposedly better, but that wasn’t the case. And the East German market was flooded with cheap goods from China. But soon no one wore them anymore either – the apron had gone out of fashion.
But it never completely disappeared. They were and are always available to buy. As a cheap product made of polyester, made of Dederon in the last owner-managed textile shops and online. In Ossiladen, an Eastern products mail order company based in Stendal (Saxony-Anhalt), there are old GDR original goods and around 3,500 items from a good 120 manufacturers who still produce the (now popular again) GDR brands to this day. The Dederon apron “in light blue with a loose, light cut – great pattern and bright colors” is currently available there for 32.99 euros. “Dive into the past and experience the nostalgic charm of the GDR,” is how the good piece is advertised. With the note: “Made in East Germany!”
Produced in Eibenstock
The apron is produced in Eibenstock, a small town in the Western Ore Mountains. Today is the Apron manufacturing Hans Schuster According to its own information, it is the sole manufacturer of Dederon aprons in Germany.
Once founded as an embroidery business, the company has been around since 1957. The aprons were only added at the beginning of the 1960s, says Birgit Mädler, owner and daughter of the company founder, when the GDR obliged the companies to produce consumer goods. The state with its planned economy wanted children’s aprons. And the ones from Eibenstock had a special feature, namely embroidered motifs: flowers, teddy bears, mice or matryoshkas.
The 64-year-old grew up with and in the company. It is a small private company with around 50 seamstresses that was never nationalized, as Mädler reports. “Most seamstresses did this at home; it was quite common in the Ore Mountains back then.”
Mädler initially went her own way professionally, studied and worked in a leather factory and had children during the reunification period. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she became unemployed, like so many working women in East Germany. Your business was closed. What could be better than helping out in your parents’ business?
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But after the fall of communism, no one wanted to buy children’s aprons anymore. “During the GDR era, every child in kindergarten had an apron,” says Mädler. “That was over and done with overnight.” As a small company and “with this niche product”, the company was able to stay afloat better than the larger textile companies in the east. The economic downturn in the first years after the fall of communism was still “massive”; only four seamstresses worked for the apron production. And the range has been expanded to include aprons for women.
Mädler took over the company in 2007 and today she only employs one seamstress who works on call. She says she didn’t have to put any money into the company, also because she continues to work with the old machines from before. Only the bolts of fabric are new and are printed with the various motifs in a company in Frankenberg (near Chemnitz). She produces around 500 aprons a year. You can order them via the company’s homepage, by email or by phone.
Because of tradition
Birgit Mädler doesn’t have to live off the smock aprons. She does it for “the fun of the work” and for tradition. She earns her money with a half-time job as an education consultant for fair trade through a one-world association. Using apron production in her company, for example, she conveys to school classes the value of their work in contrast to the conditions of textile production in low-wage Asian countries.
The aprons “determined my entire life,” says Mädler. And if someone is happy when they buy an apron or is reminded of the past, such as grandma in her apron, “then that’s basically the reward for me,” she says. “It has a nostalgic moment,” the apron is “a little piece of home.”
Of course, she herself wears an apron: “When I come into work, I automatically grab an apron because you don’t feel comfortable at work without an apron.”
The Dederon coat aprons are long-lasting, says Birgit Mädler. And the resulting fabric scraps are used to make clip-on dresses and shopping bags. They are a great alternative to plastic bags and cotton bags because they have the good material properties of Dederon and are “sustainable and indestructible”.