Tracht Munich & Stuttgart, costume as inheritance, September 2024
On the first Sunday of Oktoberfest, roughly nine thousand people in sixty groups walk seven kilometres through Munich in clothes their great-grandparents would recognise. The Trachten- und Schützenzug has run every year since 1950, and the first one was staged in 1835 for a royal silver wedding. Five days later and two hundred kilometres north-west, Stuttgart opens the Cannstatter Wasen and does the same thing in a Swabian accent. Four million people will pass through it.
This project is not about the beer, and it is not really about the parade. It is about the clothes, what happens to an inheritance when somebody has to physically put it on and walk around in it. A man wears his grandfather's Janker with gold buttons the size of coins. A couple crosses Marienplatz in lederhosen, tattoos and Air Force 1s. Somebody wears a plush roast chicken on his head. All of it is Tracht; none of them are wearing it the same way. Shot over nine days on a single 50mm lens, from 09:58 on Marienplatz to 23:24 on the last train home.
Marienplatz, 09:58
Before the brass, there is just people getting dressed and going outside. Some of them have been doing this for sixty years. Some of them borrowed it. From ten paces you cannot always tell which.
The Parade
Seven kilometres of it, and the whole city leans off its balconies to watch. Down at knee height, the dachshund has decided none of this concerns him.
After Dark
The buttons are still gold at midnight, but nobody is performing any more. On the U-Bahn the costume rides home like ordinary clothes, which is all it ever was.
