It is always a great exercise to go through vintage magazines and discover (or rediscover) designers lost in time or creators that history may have forgotten.If you leaf through summer issues of magazines from the '50s or the '60s you may for example easily stumble upon beachwear by Bessie Becker.
Her real name was actually Irmgard Elisabeth Schulte and she was born in Grünstadt, Germany, in 1919. She didn't start her career in fashion, but she worked as a costume designer between 1941 and 1959, creating costumes for various war and post-war German films.
After 1945 she started working as fashion illustrator for Heute, the first German-language magazine published after the end of Second World War, and as a costume designer at the Kammerspiele Theatre, in Munich.
Here she founded in 1952 her fashion house, focusing on teen fashion and later on ready-to-wear. Two years later Life magazine highlighted that, while German designs weren't usually original, Bessie Becker's clothes were well-made with high quality fabrics.
As the years passed Becker managed to gain notoriety beyond the borders of Germany and built her following in Europe and the US with her beachwear, often donned in photoshoots by models such as Regina Relang and Joan Whelan. Some of her designs went into the archive of the National Museum in Nuremberg in the '60s; the designer died in 1971.
The images in this post (from the second photograph on) are taken from a Capri-inspired photoshoot for a 1960 Italian magazine: all the images featured Bessie Becker's designs, and while there is one light dress in solid red and black, her most successful garments remained the ones characterised by bright and vivid prints, such as popeline and linen tunics, kimono sleeve jackets and summer dresses with graphic patterns of flowers, fruit or abstract elements in bright colours, possibly accessorised with straw hats.
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