Excerpted from a speech on the Modellschau

Excerpted from a speech on the Modellschau, an event organized in 1915 to promote Viennese fashion, Vetter's comments make clear that the Werkstatte salon had not succeeded in its goal of bringing modernist fashion design to a broad public. Because of their originality, high quality, and exorbitant prices, these avant-garde clothes ultimately could not enter the everyday routines of the average metropolitan woman but remained exiled in the remote realm of high art.

It was not simply their status as art, however, that prevented most Viennese women from adopting the clothes of the Floge salon and the Wiener Werkstatte. The stylistically provocative designs proved to be too unusual for the average Viennese woman, who would not have been able to afford the garments had they conformed to her tastes, as well as for the women of the aristocracy, who would have had the financial resources to patronize these salons. Middle and upper class civil servants and members of the bureaucracy (professions which were barred to Jews) generally wore ready-to-wear clothing that conformed to the swiftly changing tastes of mass-produced fashion, while the women of the aristocracy followed the standards set by the Parisian designers of haute couture. Aside from isolated champions like Zuckerkandl, the clothing produced by the Wiener Werkstatte was still viewed with skepticism by much of the press, and most critics maintained that these dresses simply remained too bizarre for everyday use.

Part of the discomfort contemporary observers exhibited towards the new fashion may be traced to the vigilant message of the reform dress movement which had heavily influenced modernist clothing design in Vienna. The clothes created by the Schwestern Floge and the Werkstatte feature the basic characteristics of reform dress, eliminating the corset and utilizing loosely draped fabrics to allow freedom of movement. Reformist designers sought to gain the physical liberation of women by designing clothes which would not constrict the free, healthy movement of the body by subjecting it to the debilitating cage of a corset. German and Belgian attempts at clothing reform, such as those by Paul Schultze-Naumburg and Henry van de Velde, began to attract attention in Vienna as early as 1902, but its views were by no means conventional. Although Schultze-Naumburg declared in 1903 that "Corsets are out!", the "S-line" figure--a form produced by a corset which eliminated the stomach, pushed the bust forward and raised the buttocks--continued to dominate Viennese fashion. In 1908, women wore a hip belt over the corset and, in 1909, the long corset came into fashion, which laced away the hips to produce an extremely slim contour. his extravagantly slender silhouette reached its high point in 1911, when the skirt's narrow shape became so exaggerated that the woman could hardly move. Dress reformers' renunciation of the corset signified political as well as physical emancipation, and went hand in hand with the demand for women's rights. The Schwestern Floge and Wiener Werkstatte did away with the corset during a period in which it was still very much the standard in contemporary dress, and in which the liberationist agenda of the reform style coincided with an intensely threatening feminist movement. At a time in which Otto Weininger's startlingly popular book Sex and Character proposed the essential degeneracy and baseness of women, a style of dress associated with women's independence and intelligence was not going to find broad, unproblematic acceptance with the Viennese public.