Bauhaus Costume Parties
When people talk about the Bauhaus school, they usually focus on the furniture, the typography, the clean lines that shaped modern design. But between 1919 and 1933, the Bauhaus was also known for something far less orderly: its parties.
The school believed that art wasn’t something you switched on during class and off afterward. Creativity was a full-body, full-life experience. Students were expected to be immersed in art at all times, and that immersion extended naturally into celebrations, festivals, and nightlife. Parties popped up on seemingly random occasions, keeping the atmosphere lively, social, and experimental.
The most memorable events were the costume parties. These basically were theatrical, concept-driven spectacles where students designed and built their own costumes according to a theme. The results were often strange, abstract, and deliberately confusing. Bodies disappeared into shapes. Faces were hidden. Form was distorted.
In his 1925 essay Life at the Bauhaus, artist Farkas Molnár described surreal scenes of bodies inside red cubes, towering figures crossing the floor, mechanical beings with no obvious anatomy, light projections, suspended performers, and even bursts of fragrance. Over time, these gatherings evolved into carefully staged productions, complete with sets and costumes designed in the school’s workshop. The themes ranged from the Beard, Nose and Heart party to the White party – in which revellers were asked to dress in ‘two thirds white, one third spotted, checked or striped’.
One legendary event, the Metal Party, featured costumes made from tin foil, silverware, pots, and pans. Guests entered by sliding down a chute into a room filled with silver balls and the sound of ringing bells. The faculty joined in, too. Contemporary accounts describe a “grotesque menagerie” of professors: Kandinsky dressed as an antenna, Itten as an amorphous monster, Feininger as two triangles, Moholy-Nagy as a pierced geometric form, Gropius as Le Corbusier, and Paul Klee as the song of the blue tree.
The Triadic Ballet
If the Bauhaus parties were about loosening up, The Triadic Ballet was about structure, geometry, and control—though it still felt strange, playful, and surprisingly alive.
Created by artist and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer, The Triadic Ballet was built entirely around the number three. Three dancers. Three sections. Twelve short dances. Even the title came from the musical term “triad.” For Schlemmer, three was the number where the individual and the opposite dissolved into something collective.
First performed in full in 1922, the ballet explored relationships between body, costume, space, form, colour, and sound.
The dancers—1 woman and 2 men—wore sculptural costumes that transformed them into walking geometry: spheres, cones, cylinders, cubes. These outfits were heavy, rigid, and restrictive. Movement did not come from the dancer’s freedom, but from the costume itself.
As Schlemmer put it, the costumes were “ambulant architectures.”
The ballet unfolded in three distinct moods. The first section, set against a lemon-yellow backdrop, was playful and humorous. The second, on a pink stage, felt ceremonial and restrained. The final section, set in black, turned mystical and otherworldly. The music ranged from cheerful and grotesque to solemn and spiritual, especially in the later version composed by Paul Hindemith.
The Triadic Ballet became one of the most influential Avant-Garde dance works of the 20th century and a true “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a total work of art. It captured the Bauhaus belief that art could reshape how bodies move, how space feels, and how humans relate to one another.
In the late 1960s, Das Triadische Ballett was reconstructed as a thirty-minute work for German television by Margarete Hasting, Franz Schömbs, and Georg Verden. The project was an ambitious one: by that point, only about eight minutes of Paul Hindemith’s original score were known to survive, and no complete or detailed record of Oskar Schlemmer’s choreography was thought to exist. The ballet therefore had to be pieced together from scattered notes, sketches, and visual material, much of it linked to Schlemmer’s 1938 costume and design exhibition at MoMA.
The Influence of Oskar Schlemmer to this day
Oskar Schlemmer’s influence didn’t end when The Triadic Ballet came off the stage. It kept traveling, through art, design, performance, and eventually popular culture, long after his lifetime. What felt shocking in 1922, like turning dancers into walking geometry and treating the body as something to be designed, became a reference point for generations of artists.
His vision of the human figure as part sculpture, part machine opened the door to experimental choreography, stage design, and multimedia performances that still echo his ideas today.
And, of course, we couldn’t resist borrowing a little design inspiration along the way.
