Dirndls on the dance floor
Hip-hop blared from oversize speakers. Half-finished beer glasses teetered precariously along the bar, and a scrum of teenage bodies writhed on the dimly lit dance floor. It was a regular night out in hip urban Munich.
And everyone was in 19th-century Alpine peasant dress.
In Bavaria in 2018, tradition is trendy and custom is cool. Bavarian teenagers, who once wore jeans and T-shirts in Oktoberfest season, are going clubbing in dirndl and lederhosen.
“Ten years ago, we rarely saw a dirndl in the disco,” said Dierk Beyer, a manager at Neuraum, a popular nightclub near the site of the Oktoberfest. “Now it’s normal.”
The dirndl (pronounced DEERN-del), a low-cut, tightly laced traditional dress, and lederhosen, its male counterpart of knee-length deer leather pants, were once considered the dusty uniform of older, more conservative folk in the countryside.
After years of edging into the mainstream, they are now all the rage with millennials, who are evolving tradition and folklore into a youth culture that can surprise outsiders.
“I love your pretzel nose stud!” Martina Schulze, a lanky 17-year-old with a baseball cap and forest-green dirndl, shrieked into the ear of her best friend — who promptly returned the compliment: “Cool edelweiss cap!”
National identity may be a popular rallying cry for conservatives and a resurgent far-right. But many young Bavarians say they are not talking politics by celebrating their heritage — they are claiming it back and at times subverting it.
On a recent night, the dance floor of Neuraum was a festival of dirndl in its endless varieties. There was a black goth dirndl cascading over tattooed calves. Next to it, a gaggle of pink and baby blue ones worn with sneakers. Young men sweating in woolly calf warmers and felt hats were grinding up to young women in flowery aprons.
Even outside Oktoberfest season, which included 16 days of drunken beer tent fun, the cool kids wear pretzel-shaped studs and edelweiss caps. Sausages and dachshunds (yes, dachshunds) are equally popular motifs as images of Bavarian identity — as is “1516,” the year the first Bavarian law regulating the ingredients of beer was passed.
Some hip workplaces have reportedly instituted “Dirndl Fridays” all year round, while Bavarian bands like Liquid rap in hipster beards and thick Bavarian dialect.
The dialect, once discouraged in city nurseries and schools, is itself experiencing something of an urban revival. As Michelle Rödel, a 19-year-old apprentice teacher recovering at the bar in a burgundy dirndl, put it, “Hoamad rocks.”
“Hoamad” is dialect for “Heimat,” a fuzzy but evocative German term roughly meaning home, identity and a sense of being rooted in familiar landscapes.