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Tatjana Patitz 2011 in Berlin: Basically, fashion is not that important, but the personality of those who wear it
Photo:
Britta Pedersen / dpa
There she is right now.
She's on TV and I'm shocked.
Once again.
Tatjana Patitz is dead?
I can not believe that.
Everywhere it is said that the nineties are back, they are being awakened, and there I see one of the most famous faces of this time.
But with the news of their death, they immediately disappear again, like a mirage.
Tatjana Patitz had this incredibly mysterious face, which can be seen unmistakably in the photo of Peter Lindbergh among the other models of the time.
Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Karen Mulder and Stephanie Seymour, back in Brooklyn in 1991.
That face was unforgettable.
It's unforgettable.
Those Slavic eyes.
There are many photos where Tatjana was hugged by a husky to illustrate the resemblance.
Those incredible animalistic blue-green eyes, along with her face and body, made her look like an Asian sculpture.
It was a magical look.
We were looking into an earthquake of a new model era, each and everyone a supermodel and not supermodel as they were always called.
They stood above all categories of beauty and sensuality.
After that, so many models came onto the catwalk and you didn't really know what their names were.
You knew who Christy was.
You just knew who Naomi, who Claudia, and of course who Tatjana was.
The Lindbergh photo tells us that fashion isn't really that important, it's the personality of the wearer.
These five, six models are just legendary, and that's really fascinating.
I don't know if our present time can still produce such legends.
I just watched the Balenciaga fashion show.
An apocalyptic feeling creeps up on me, as if the anonymous dominates us more and more.
Everything on the Internet is provided with small texts and comments, the models comment back, but you still don't know them.
The beauties of that time were silent, they didn't give inflationary interviews, they kept their mysterious aura.
Little was known about Tatjana Patitz.
For a while she was in a relationship with Seal, who later became Heidi Klum's husband.
But little was known about it either.
Since 1988 she has been living very secluded in California.
When her face reappeared after a long time at the beginning of the two-thousanders, you could see that she had retained her beauty.
It was hard to digest by normal standards what these women looked like back then.
They embodied the spirit of the nineties, where you simply dared everything, still put everything on one card.
You can also see that in the destinies of designers like Versace or Galliano, it was a time that allowed everything, a time that used up everything.
Also eccentric people in a strange way.
Now one has the feeling that the next guard no longer has any idea of this time.
A lot of young people who deal with fashion and designers don't even know these faces and these names.
At that time it was about an unbroken idea of beauty.
The 90's were about celebrating these super photographers like Herb Ritts, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mario Sorrenti, they were about celebrating these super people, these super characters.
Back then, anyone who could afford these faces as designers, as photographers, as people and as admirers.
After that, that aura was gone.
When I saw the Balenciaga show, I also saw a new message.
The faces were gone, everything was gone, make-up removed, cloaked in full-body rubber suits.
And then came »real faces« as it was called, lived faces, practically as a provocation.
Nicole Kidman performed.
And then came the reality stars around Kim Kardashian and co. That was a strange message.
She conveyed the opposite of this addiction to beauty and also to this addiction to freedom.
It was not for nothing that the supermodels appeared in the music video for George Michael's song "Freedom" in 1990 as an illustration of this time.
It was a time without prohibitions, without reflection.
Today, both accompany everything permanently.
Am I allowed to do that?
Am I not allowed to do this?
can i say that
Whom could I offend?
Who is going to correct me now?
There wasn't.
All of us, my generation, my profession, of course we all mourn this time and are sad that there are fewer and fewer people who have the courage to stand by what they think and say.
Everyone I knew suddenly wanted to retire.
Nadja Auermann lives in Dresden with her daughter and her son.
Claudia also lives very withdrawn.
For a long time you didn't know anything about Tatjana and didn't see anything at all.
She was suspicious of the internet, she was critical of social media, she would have liked to have pressed the "off" button.
Naomi was the only one who stuck around, sometimes to the point of grotesqueness, almost becoming a kind of fictional character like Grace Jones.
And it is also understandable that many withdrew, they wanted to hide.
If you were photographed for a week and then you could be seen everywhere, you were at times the most famous blonde in the world.
The hype is usually over by the time you're 28 or 30 years old.
Although a woman is beautiful privately and reaches her climax.
But not everyone can switch to acting.
Very few manage to slip into new roles.
They remain themselves, even if they wear different wardrobes.
And then at some point comes the big time for reflection: What am I going to do with the rest of my life?
Linda Evangelista is the only one who has been very open and provocative about her capital evaporating, who has been open about her cosmetic surgery accidents.
It's a kind of "twilight boulevard" syndrome.
Losing beauty means losing power, and that's hard to take.
But Tatjana Patitz remained beautiful and she remained powerful – by distancing herself from the modeling business both internally and externally.
She fought for animal protection, warned against the extinction of species, renounced many things that many in her profession would never renounce.
Karl Lagerfeld once said: »The injustice of life is the charm of life.« As an exceptional phenomenon, one often later has the feeling of wanting to give something back from this hype, from this unbelievably unfair distribution of beauty, from this mega fee.
This often manifests itself in charity.
Tatjana also got involved, wanting to show herself as someone who not only takes but also gives.
Quasi as an apology for the injustice of nature.
I knew Tatjana Patitz well.
Although I've never worked directly with her, I've run into her from time to time, for example at photographers' parties in the US.
We Germans immediately bonded, and when we said goodbye, we always shouted to each other that we had to see each other again soon.
And then it never happened.
We should have made it real.
Now it is too late.