Nobody here wears Lederhosen to the office. Let’s get that out of the way early, because the mental picture most people have of German clothing comes from a beer tent in Munich, and that beer tent represents one region of one state for about two weeks a year.
And yet. Stand outside a church in Rosenheim on a Sunday morning and half the men walking out are in leather shorts, and not one of them is doing it for you.
So we Germans have two wardrobes, and they hardly touch. One is what we put on to go to work. The other is Tracht (regional dress), which has rules, and a history messier than the postcards suggest.
What We Actually Put On in the Morning
Dark colors, decent shoes, a jacket that can handle rain. That is the German street from Kiel down to Konstanz. The look is not fashionable and is not trying to be. It is trying to last five years.
Two things catch American visitors out. You will hardly see anyone in sweatpants outside of actual sport, and gym clothes at the bakery read here roughly the way a bathrobe would read at your grocery store. We also spend money on shoes and notice yours. Sorry about that.
Every German child hears this about nine thousand times: Es gibt kein schlechtes Wetter, nur falsche Kleidung (there is no bad weather, only wrong clothing). Bring a real rain jacket and shoes you can walk eight hours in, and you have solved most of dressing for a trip here.
Oh, and expect to take your shoes off inside a German home. Many households keep a basket of guest slippers by the door. Wear them. :-)
Dirndl and Lederhosen, and Where They Belong
Bavaria and the Alpine strip. That is the range.
A Dirndl in Hamburg looks about as native as a cowboy hat in Boston, and people in Hamburg will happily tell you so.
The word comes from Dirn, an old term for a maid, and the dress began as working clothes for exactly those women. What you see today is not that dress. City people who summered in the mountains reshaped it in the late nineteenth century, and the Wallach brothers in Munich turned it into a business before their store was taken from them in 1938. So the Dirndl is a city idea of the countryside, which does not make it fake. It makes it about a hundred and thirty years old rather than five hundred.
The apron knot means something. On the wearer’s left she is single, on the right she is taken, in the back widowed or working the tables. That code is modern, though, not some medieval signal system, whatever the postcard says. Everyone reads it anyway, so tie it where you mean it.
Lederhosen are deer or goat leather, cut at or above the knee, and meant to be inherited. A good pair goes darker and softer every year you wear it, which is precisely why you never wash them.
Ever.
Buying either one? Buy it in Bavaria, from a Trachten shop, not from a costume site. The difference is obvious to every person in the tent, and a real one lasts thirty years.
The Hat from Three Villages
Open any brochure about the Black Forest and there she is: a young woman in a straw hat covered in fat red pompoms. That is a Bollenhut, and it comes from three villages. Gutach, Kirnbach near Wolfach, and Reichenbach near Hornberg, all of them Protestant, all in the Kinzig valley.
Red pompoms mean unmarried, black means married. The hat weighs up to 2 kg (about 4.4 lbs) and takes a milliner a week to build, and very few women still know how.
Now for the German clothing you are most likely to meet and least likely to recognize. Somewhere on this trip you may see a young man at a highway on-ramp in a black wide-brimmed hat, a waistcoat, flared black corduroy trousers, and a curled walking stick. He is not in costume. He is a Wandergeselle, a journeyman carpenter on his Walz: three years and a day away from home, never closer than 50 km (31 mi) to it, working for bed and board.
His Kluft is a set of statements. Eight buttons on the waistcoat for the eight-hour day, six on the jacket for the six-day week, black for carpenters and gray for stonemasons. If one of them asks you for a lift, give him one.
Four Labels and a Funeral
Hugo Boss started in 1924 in Metzingen, a Swabian town of no particular importance, sewing work clothes and loden jackets. The factory made uniforms under the Third Reich and used forced labor, researched and published at the company’s own expense in 2011. It did not design those uniforms, whatever half the internet tells you.
What grew out of that little sewing operation is a different animal entirely. Two labels run side by side today, BOSS at the classic end and HUGO for the younger crowd, and although the tailored suit is still what the name means to most people, the business spread long ago into womenswear, kidswear, shoes, and a licensing arm that puts those four letters on fragrances, eyewear, and watches. Sales run to roughly four billion euros a year across something like eighteen thousand employees, which makes it one of the largest clothing companies in the country.
And it never left town. The headquarters is still in Metzingen, on a campus the company keeps rebuilding instead of relocating, and that reshaped the place around it. Boss opened a factory outlet there in 1972 to clear surplus stock, it worked better than anyone expected, and other labels moved in next door to do the same. A town of about 22,000 people now pulls in several million shoppers a year, many of them flying in from abroad for no other reason. It sits under an hour south of Stuttgart, and on a Saturday you will not be the only car heading that way.
Karl Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg in 1933, into a family whose money came from evaporated milk, and by the 1980s he was running Chanel, Fendi, and his own label at once. Jil Sander is the one I would point to, though, if you want to understand German taste. She opened a black-painted boutique in the same city in the late 1960s and spent a career taking things away: no pattern, no logo, no decoration, just cut and very expensive cloth. The press called her the Queen of Less.
My favorite story here belongs to a woman whose name is not on the door. Bogner was founded in Munich in 1932 by Willy Bogner, a ski champion, but his wife Maria redrew ski pants in the 1950s into the tapered Keilhose. Marilyn Monroe wore them, and Americans of a certain age called the things “Bogners” no matter who made them.
Not everyone made it. Strenesse, out of Nördlingen, was the German designer label of the 1990s, and after two insolvencies and a shutdown in 2020 only the name survives.
One might argue that we make clothes beautifully here and sell them badly.
Two Brothers, One River, and a Cork Footbed
Adolf and Rudolf Dassler made sports shoes together in their mother’s laundry room in Herzogenaurach from 1924 on. By 1948 they were no longer speaking. Rudolf crossed the little Aurach river and founded Puma. Adolf stayed put, took the Adi that everybody called him, stuck the first syllable of Dassler on the end, and registered Adidas in 1949.
Both are still headquartered in that same small Bavarian town, minutes apart, and Adidas has grown into one of the two largest sportswear companies on earth.
Locals called the place the town of lowered eyes, because the first thing anyone checked was which shoes you had on.
Birkenstock goes back to a village cobbler recorded in 1774, and the sandal you know arrived in 1963. The hippie association, though, is entirely American: Margot Fraser brought them to California in 1966 and could only get health food stores to stock them. Here they were orthopedic shoes your grandmother wore in the garden.
The shoe trade has real geography here, and most of it sits in one corner of the Palatinate. Pirmasens was the center of German shoemaking for well over a century. Neighboring Hauenstein still keeps a shoe museum inside an old factory, and both lie on a signposted loop called the German Shoe Route. Do not expect a polished tourist trail. The industry it was built to celebrate largely moved abroad, the route gets almost no promotion now, and in places the signs are rusting on their posts. Drive it anyway.
Leather is a separate story with a separate capital, hours north of all that. Offenbach am Main, east of Frankfurt, grew rich on leather goods and keeps a museum holding four thousand years of footwear, right down to the sneakers a German politician wore to be sworn in as a state minister in 1985. Which caused a proper scandal at the time.
Buying Clothes While You Are Here
German sizes are numbers, and the numbers mean nothing to you. Rough guide:
| The label says | In US terms, roughly |
|---|---|
| Women’s 36 | size 4 to 6 |
| Women’s 40 | size 8 to 10 |
| Women’s 44 | size 12 to 14 |
| Men’s jacket 50 | 40 regular |
| Shoe 39 | women’s 8, men’s 6 |
| Shoe 43 | men’s 9.5, women’s 11 |
Take that table with a grain of salt. There is no standard behind it: half the conversion charts online subtract 30 from the German women’s number, the other half subtract 32, and brands wander off in both directions anyway.
Which brings me to the rule that catches Americans hardest. A German store is not obliged to take anything back. Buy it in a shop and legally it is yours, full stop. Chains usually offer an exchange as a courtesy, often for store credit rather than money, but that is goodwill and not a right. The fitting room is where you decide, not your hotel room.
Also: stores close on Sundays. All of them, more or less, apart from bakeries in the morning and shops inside train stations and airports. Plan for Saturday, or discover on Sunday afternoon that an entire country has gone for a walk in the woods. ;-)
One last thought, and it is the reason many of you write to me. If there is a pair of Lederhosen somewhere in your family, brought over in 1890 or 1952 and sitting in a cedar chest, get them out and look at the stitching on the front flap and the horn buttons. A person did that by hand, in a town whose name is probably still on the map.
More on how we live over on German culture, what ends up on our plates on German cuisine, and why that little label matters so much to us on Made in Germany.