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The foundation of Schneider’s Sissi image and what it represented in mid-1950s Europe were the culmination of previous film characters and media appearances since 1953, especially her first major film role as young Queen Victoria of Great Britain in her third film Mädchenjahre einer Königin (Victoria in Dover, Marischka, 1954). This biopic with elements of romantic comedy narrates the early reign of the Queen, from her ascension to the throne to her engagement with her cousin Prince Albert. Particularly striking in Victoria in Dover and a founding element to Schneider’s princess persona was the historical wardrobe in addition to its romantic image (with details such as pink roses and lace trimming).
At the age of 17, Schneider filmed Sissi. It was a phenomenal success with German-speaking audiences in the year following its release over the 1955 Christmas holidays in Austria and West Germany, and was subsequently well-received in other European countries, to become the most successful German-speaking film of the 1950s on the continent (with the notable exception of the UK).
Two successful sequels followed: Sissi: The Young Empress (1956) and Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress (1957). The trilogy highly romanticises the life of Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898). Sissi presents the romantic encounter in 1853 in Bad Ischl (Upper Austria) and the courtship between young Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria (Sissi) and Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, who is at first promised to become engaged to Sissi’s elder sister. The film ends with their wedding in Vienna on 24th April 1854.
The second film focuses on Elisabeth’s struggles to adjust to her new life at the Vienna imperial court after her wedding, then centres on the tense relationship with her mother-in-law Archduchess Sophie, the birth of her first child, her attempts to make peace with Hungarian dissidents on behalf of her husband, and the imperial couple’s final coronation as King and Queen of Hungary. The third film narrates Sissi’s illness, her recuperation in Madeira and Corfu in the company of her supportive mother Duchess Ludovika (played by Schneider’s own mother Magda Schneider), and an official visit to Italy, where a hostile crowd in Venice begins to cheer, won over by the reunion of Sissi and her young daughter.
I believe that the reasons for the series’ European success reside in the felicitous association of this particular fairy-tale narrative and character with Schneider who was already a significant star attached to a rosy image. I identify several ways in which Schneider started to move beyond a Germanic persona and captivated European audiences, two of them being a narrative development that established the actress as a sexual being and Schneider’s appeal to European popular memory through the transition she made visually in the Sissi series, establishing an iconography especially by means of costumes, from Princess, to Queen and Empress.
Historical costume film was very popular in 1950s Austria and Western Europe (Harper 1994; Fritsche 2013: 59-60), and costumes themselves were part of the spectators’ multi-sensorial pleasure (for example, in the Sissis, the sound of rustling fabric can be heard when a dress passes a door). As the Sissi trilogy unfolded, an increasing number of glamorous ball gowns worn by Schneider promoted the image of an alluring young star and reinforced her princess persona. First, I focus on the costumes’ design in regard to their adaptation to historical reality, to 1950s fashion, and to Schneider’s physique. Then, I consider how costumes translated Sissi’s narrative development.
Sissi’s costumes have first to be explored regarding their degree of authenticity (Cook, 1996: 64; Hayward 2010: 38, 60-62). Designers Gerdago (Gerda Gottstein, who worked on the three films), Franz Szivats (Sissi), and Leo Bei (Sissi 2 and Sissi 3) made sure that their creations shared similarities to their historical models, further embedding Schneider’s image of the fairy-tale princess into historical reality.
The dresses were loosely inspired by European royal fashion from the mid-19th century and by some of Elisabeth of Austria’s own ball gowns. The term ‘ball’ is important: there was a distinction between the Empress’s daily attire and her more elaborate ball gowns dedicated to special occasions, official appearances and ceremonies. Costume designers deliberately chose the latter, a more glamorous-connoted option for Schneider’s dresses, a couple of them directly quoting Elisabeth’s most iconic representations. The design of the Empress’s imposing gowns was particularly complicated and cluttered: in her full-length official portrait by Winterhalter (fig. 1, left) she wears a creation by Charles Frederic Worth made of an accumulation of fluffy petticoats and tulle sewn with diamonds stars (matching the jewels in her hair), and completed with a shawl.
For her coronation as Queen of Hungary, she wore a silver brocade gown trimmed with lace and a midnight blue velvet bodice with pearl lacing. Those dresses were already known throughout Europe in the 1950s: the reproduction of portraits and photographs of Empress Elisabeth had helped cement her popularity during the second half of 19th century (as did her many travels across European continent and seas), and throughout the 20th century with a proliferation of biographies (Schraut 2011: 161). Such representations inspired the trilogy’s iconography, creating an inter-generational connection between the historical figure and her 1950s fictional embodiment: from the authentic bouffant ball gowns, Schneider’s costumes kept some elements, although the choice for a more subdued style was evident.
Designers respected the width of the skirts, and some of the colours (mostly whites, midnight blue, Venetian red, and bottle green) wore by the Empress before she strictly observed a mourning wardrobe. But the overall design in the films was much simpler and more delicate, especially the upper body parts where the historical swollen sleeves adorned with curlicues were replaced by tiny, ruffled, and off-the-shoulders sleeves. Yet, some costumes were directly imitating the historical attires, such as Sissi’s engagement and wedding dresses that were to become central in Schneider’s ‘Europe’s little fiancée’ image.
Many magazine covers pictured the star wearing the engagement attire (figuring the Empress’s diamond stars in the hair), itself inspired by Winterhalter’s portrait replicated to the exact pose by Schneider in studio stills and posters (fig. 1, right), and the wedding dress with taglines such as ‘I too want my wedding gown’ (Deutsche Illustrierte, 28 January 1956, cover) (fig. 2), reinforcing her ideal wife-potential image. Schneider’s various dresses gave the sense of a historic look, yet is also fit in 1950s aesthetics.
Equally significant to their historical references were the costumes’ adaptations to 1950s fashion, especially the New Look’s hyper-feminine silhouette. Aptly, the New Look itself drew inspiration from the romantic ‘princess gown’ style from Second Empire France (the same era of Elisabeth of Austria). Couture designers such as Charles James and Christian Dior created strict hour-glass flower shapes with wasp-waisted bodices and extravagant use of fabric for long, crinoline-like skirts.
The New Look aimed to revive fantasy, luxury, and the classical iconography of ‘eternal beauty’ after the privations of World War II (Steele 1997: 13-15; Hayward 2010: 277), which was precisely the effect of Schneider’s ball gowns that feature a form fitting bodice, a discrete emphasis on the shoulders with their dropping and short sleeves, and a full stiff skirt as well. Schneider’s costumes went so far as to introduce fashionable 1950s colours such as soft pastels (baby pink, aquamarine, light blue, orange, and purple), and pattern and accessories like polka dots, white long gloves, pearl necklaces, and wide-brimmed saucer hats. The lush ball dress of the title character in Walt Disney’s animated film Cinderella (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1950) already made the synthesis of the historical princess style of the second-half of the 19th century with the New Look just a couple of years before the Sissis, and shared striking resemblance with Schneider’s costumes (fig. 3). The wide cut of the dress, the small sleeves, and the long gloves were reprised in most of Schneider’s gowns.
These might be direct quotes as Cinderella came out in West Germany in December 1951 and in Austria a year later. Although Cinderella does not appear in Joseph Garncarz’s Top Ten list for the year 1951-1952 in West Germany (1994: 124)1, its 13 million spectators in French cinemas (it was the second highest success that year [Simsi 2012: 15]) confirms the ongoing popularity of fairy-tale narratives. The film was even re-released in France in 1958, the same year Sissi 3 and Christine (Pierre Gaspard-Huit), also starring Schneider, came out, and in West Germany in 1960 at the Berlin Film Festival. Cinderella is still the princess figure par excellence, its success is bounded to a specific narrative moment (the makeover, see later), and a particular body type. Indeed, Schneider’s physique also participated in the popularity of her image in costumes.
The memorable visual spectacle of Schneider in her princess dress makes clear that costumes were also adapted to her physique. Enhancing her bodily transformation, they were therefore central to the visualisation of her coming-of-age. The star turned 18 and 19 over the filming of the trilogy, she was slim, with a small chest, and therefore departed from the fashionable fuller and curvy figure of the 1830s (sloping shoulders, rounded bust, narrow waist and full hips).
As previously said, the upper body parts of Schneider’s dresses differed from their historical references, in that they emphasised and flattered her feminine features. With a simple and form-fitting design, short sleeves, and low-cut neckline, they drew the eye to the actress’s juvenile aspect. It was conventionally required of Schneider to perform the fresh maiden as well as the glamorous fiancée, and therefore to induce male desire without appearing too ostensibly sexy, and her costumes did exactly so – they discretely eroticised her character.
This double standard is illustrated in Schneider’s skin exposure: her costumes were designed to express the Empress’s dignified status, yet their cut emphasised the breasts and reveal an important amount of pale skin (neckline, shoulders, arms, hands), a complexion that carries concepts of nobility and refinement (see Dyer 1997). The full-skirted petticoat gowns made of precious fabrics and adorned with jewels lengthened her silhouette, refined her waist (emphasised by a corset and a V-shaped waistline bodice or a tight belt), and induced a different body posture and movements (Schneider walked and moved more slowly, and stood tall and straight, and the corset, by constraining her breathing, emphasised the breathing movement of her chest).
At first, some romantic details (such as discrete floral pattern and tiny pink butterflies and roses on the neckline) persisted on the gowns, but later the emphasis was on the dropping of the trains and the skirts lines (long strips of fabrics such as belts and shawls) to further lengthen the actress’s figure. The absence of overwhelming details and ornaments on the dresses or in the hair gave focus on the actress’s performance, the movements of long skirts smoothly accompanying her walk and dance, which, combined with her soft voice and thin upper body, suggested an ambivalent image of femininity: growing elegant, graceful, and confident, while also remaining delicate and fragile (fig. 4). How to explain the look’s popularity throughout the years? The princess silhouette popularised by Schneider (and Cinderella) might function as an ‘iconogramme’, a visual landmark, quickly identifiable because monosemic and belonging to a ‘shared knowledge’ (de la Bretèque 1998: 294). The key is that Schneider’s dresses were made of simple figurative traits: simplicity of design and an absence of superfluous details (no excessive ruffles, laces, or bows, no additional layers of different fabrics like we see in many historical costume films); this figuration of a shape easily visualised do not overwhelm the viewer’s eyes, making it both iconic and familiar.
Schneider’s costumes therefore participated in the character’s coming-of-age. From the sporty and simple clothing of the girl frolicking in the woods, to the introduction of the fairy-tale princess gown (see below), there is a narrative evolution of Schneider’s costumes.
In Sissi, the young girl wears sporty, simply-cut clothes of either warm colours (dark red, brown), or soft pink and midnight blue, adorned with lace pan collar and embroidered details, silk pink scarfs and aprons, neckerchief, and bottle green gloves and felt hat (fig. 5). Her Bavarian dresses are usually ankle-length and her feet are visible to allow a greater freedom of movement. Sissi the girl is a character full of energy and therefore not yet constricted by costumes, unlike those of the mother and sister whose freedom of movement was restrained by cumbersome clothing.
When Schneider wore her Bavarian clothes, she had the opportunity to move her body more freely, as required for her performance of a vivid and enthusiastic girl. Progressively this casual costuming was replaced by sophisticated attire, illustrating both Sissi’s coming-of-age and the star’s physical growth.
One gown in particular played a fundamental role in this: I call it ‘the makeover dress’. As a trope that highlights transitions, the cinematic makeover not only maps out a female protagonist’s experience of what Mary Wilkinson (2015) calls ‘becoming woman’, but also dramatizes and rectifies the contesting notions of femininity by re-inscribing gender identity through excessive performance (here, the star’s spectacularisation in costume).
After running away from the mesmerised Emperor who was in the midst of declaring his love, Sissi’s true identity is suddenly revealed to Franz Joseph as Schneider makes a solemn entrance at his birthday ball. Her apparition is surprising to both the royal suitor and the spectator who discover Schneider in the splendour of the film’s first ‘princess panoply’. She wears an aquamarine floor-length gown made of satin and organza, and adorned with three shining stripes of floral trimming on the skirt, the bodice, the low-cut neckline, and the short puffed sleeves that uncover her shoulders; she has bright pink lips, long curls of hair cascading down her back, and she wears lace white gloves, a sparkling arrow-shaped hair jewel, and a small bucket clutch matching her dress.
As suggested by the mise-en-scène, the magnificence of the dress and the spectacular effect (fig. 6) of Schneider’s apparition was intended by Marischka to create a pivotal and lasting image of the young star.
She enters after her mother and sister, at the centre of the frame, and when she appears at the doors (creating a frame within the frame) the music hits pompous brass notes – all enhancing her appearance as iconic. By this makeover act, the unapologetic and free Sissi modifies her barely existent femininity to create a non-threatening one (Bleach 2010: 29-32). To become a ‘true woman’ – i.e. a feminine woman –, Sissi had to appear hyper-gendered and Schneider to expose her body, enhanced by her gown. We see Schneider through the eyes of her male partner Böhm: identically reproducing the Prince’s reaction in Cinderella (reinforcing the trilogy’s fairy-tale parentage), Franz Joseph is mesmerised. This was probably the same effect the producers wished the audience would experience too: a man’s glorious vision of a delicate young woman. The gaze of the opposite sex validated Schneider’s ‘worth’ inscribed onto her body.
The perfect fit between Sissi and Schneider was the result of the expert blending of the character with the star’s private and screen personas, creating authenticity, charisma, and sense of intimate connection with audiences. It began with a role developed by Marischka for Schneider who was already in tune with the historical imperial figure by virtue of her romantic princess image, well-established amongst domestic audiences before she embarked on Sissi. More importantly, Schneider contributed through performance and costume to the creation of the character and she took Elisabeth from youth to sensual maturity.
Schneider, as Sissi, was the ever-becoming woman – that is, as much as the narrative and her costumes might have stressed ambiguous, almost hidden sexuality, the star’s eyes suggested a more knowledgeable personality and seemed to have some erotic content. Schneider’s royal persona was further reinforced by her on- and off-screen relationship with Magda Schneider, a continuous presence in her daughter’s life and a constant reminder to look for the family element: Schneider was the ‘crown Princess’ of German-speaking cinema and its ideal and prestigious representative in Europe as she herself came from a dynasty of actors on her father side2. As a result, the role of Sissi and its impeccable fit with Schneider marked the star so much that no producer dared to derail from this young, fresh and precious screen persona for a while.