Many of these items were manufactured for luxury brands that are still in business today, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The show, titled The Fashion System, is curated by culture expert Karolina Sulej and historian Paweł Michna.
It uncovers a largely overlooked chapter of Holocaust history: the use of Jewish forced labour to manufacture civilian clothing and accessories for the German market, alongside goods made for the military.
Roughly half of the ghetto's output served the German war effort. The rest, the curators explain, consisted of elegant dresses, hats, lingerie, shoes and even children's rugs designed to appeal to middle-class tastes in Nazi Germany.
"This exhibition is about how fashion and clothing became tools of both violence and survival in the ghetto," Sulej told the PAP news agency.
The show's name is a nod towards the work of French cultural theorist Roland Barthes, who analysed fashion as a social system in a book of the same title, but it also points to systems of oppression and the ways in which those inside the ghetto tried to resist or survive them.
Litzmannstadt was the Nazi name for Łódź, which before the war was a hub of the Polish textile and fashion industry.
The ghetto, established by the Germans in February 1940, was the second-largest in occupied Poland, after the Warsaw Ghetto.
It lasted the longest. At its peak, over 200,000 people were imprisoned within its walls, including Jews from across Europe and a group of Roma and Sinti from Austria.
By the time the ghetto was closed in August 1944, as few as 7,000 to 13,000 people had survived.
The new exhibition highlights how the prewar expertise of Łódź’s tailors, designers and shoemakers was exploited both by the Nazi ghetto administrator Hans Biebow and by Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, the Jewish leader of the ghetto.
Rumkowski believed that labour might delay the community’s annihilation.
To this end, he oversaw the creation of production workshops, known as resorts, where men, women and children worked for a bowl of soup and a chance to survive.
'They produced real gems'
"They produced real gems," Sulej said. "There were fashion shows, catalogues sent to Germany, visiting merchants placing orders."
She added: "A whole fashion house operating inside the ghetto. But there were also deliberate efforts to erase any trace of Jewishness in the final products. Faces in photos were blacked out or replaced with drawn models. The reality of who made these goods was hidden."
Graphic design departments were also set up in the ghetto to produce promotional catalogues and branding materials.
Coffee-table books showing the production process were made for ceremonies and anniversaries, often for Rumkowski himself.
One such event is documented in the exhibition: an opening of a collection of women’s dresses, where Rumkowski spoke of "a queen of fashion visiting the ghetto."
Cognitive dissonance
Paweł Michna, the exhibition’s co-curator, has studied these materials in depth for his PhD and says they have rarely been used in Holocaust remembrance because they provoke cognitive dissonance.
"We want to bring them to light," he said. "They’re deeply unsettling but crucial for understanding the complexity of ghetto life."
Among the more jarring items on display is a catalogue of children’s rugs produced in the ghetto.
The designs include colonial, Orientalist and even pop-cultural motifs such as Mickey Mouse or scenes of cowboys and Native Americans – imagery influenced by the popular German editions of Karl May’s Western novels.
Although few original garments from the ghetto have survived, the exhibition draws on a vast archive of photographs and printed materials to show just how sophisticated and stylish these items were.
For decades, historians repeated Biebow’s claim that 90 percent of the ghetto's output supported the war effort.
According to Michna, this was a deliberate exaggeration aimed at prolonging the ghetto’s existence by stressing its economic usefulness.
New research shows the actual split was closer to 50-50, with half the goods made for civilian use, including for fashion brands that continue to operate today.
To underline the continuing relevance of the exhibition, the curators invited contemporary visual artists, such as Zuza Herzberg, Witek Orski and Krzysztof Gil, to contribute works that draw parallels with today’s global fashion industry.
"We’re not equating the ghetto to today’s garment factories in the Global South," Michna said. "But the mechanisms of violence and exploitation behind the clothes we wear still persist. Consumers are rarely aware of the conditions in which their clothes are made."
The exhibition, supported by Poland’s Ministry of Culture and the German foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, runs until February 1 next year at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź.
The Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, central Poland. Photo: MOs810, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP, cmwl.pl