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From 1898 to 1958, Chic Parisien / Bachwitz AG operated out of Vienna’s Palais des Beaux Arts as one of the Bachwitz family’s major publishing ventures. After Austria’s annexation into the German Third Reich in 1938, the company was Aryanized under the Nuremberg Race Laws. The family was expelled, their rights revoked. Ownership later passed to the Republic of Austria, and the company survived only administratively until its dissolution in 1958.

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Published quarterly and distributed internationally, Chic Parisien circulated hand-colored fashion illustrations that promoted lifestyles as much as garments, assembling a global imaginary in ink and pigment.

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“One edition of Chic Parisien focuses on lingerie. Women are illustrated in parlors and sitting rooms. They’re together in their underwear. Tell me this doesn’t sound extremely gay!“

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Studio Hassan approaches this archive as material rather than monument. Isolating gestures from digitized pages, Hassan lingers on moments that once seemed incidental. A sideways glance, a hand resting too long, a body leaning into another. The domestic scenes tilt. Gender shifts from instruction to improvisation. The images start to face each other.

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"(…) Wet Baggage is an art project turned queer fashion magazine, commissioned by my friends at Palais des Beaux Arts. It comes in a box (not a closet) and the box comes in a bag. The bag is very pretty and can be used for other things as well, like shopping or just looking good. This is not your typical magazine though. It’s not made from paper, it’s made from fabric.”

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The transformation is tactile. The images are printed onto fabric, released from paper and redistributed in space. Figures detach from their original rooms and drift across textile pages. What was once fixed becomes flexible. Cut, layered, carried.

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Out of this process emerges Wet Baggage. Its fabric “pages” collage early 20th-century issues of Chic Parisien, bringing the fashion illustrations back into contact with cloth. Existing outside the commercial fashion system, Wet Baggage traces how identity and alienation move through clothing, printed images, and the objects we carry.