Dressed for Freedom by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

Dressed for Freedom by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

Author:Einav Rabinovitch-Fox [Rabinovitch-Fox, Einav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Women's Studies, History, Women, Feminism & Feminist Theory
ISBN: 9780252052941
Google: iadGEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2021-11-16T04:26:52+00:00


FIGURE 4.1: Department stores, particularly Lord & Taylor under the management of Dorothy Shaver, were instrumental in promoting female American designers in the interwar period, marketing their clothes as designed by and for the modern American woman. (Fashions of Lord & Taylor, window display featuring American designers, 1933 Worsinger photo, X2010.11.4555, Museum of the City of New York)

Whereas the segregation of the printed media meant that most of the attention in the popular press was directed toward White designers, the Black press celebrated the achievements of African American designers, covering them and their fashion shows extensively. The Black press also provided a platform for designers to advertise their business, further advancing their public visibility.54 NAFAD in particular played an important role in increasing designers’ name recognition among the Black community. NAFAD members used their connections with Black publishers to publicize the organization’s fashion shows and members’ designs, giving attention not only to the clothes but also to the women who made them. Articles about NAFAD and its activities often included photographs of models wearing African American designs, with credit to the designers. Some articles also included photographs of “designers at work”—which, as in the White press, raised their celebrity status.55

Although career women, and fashion designers in particular, were only a minority among working women, they represented a subtle shift in ideas of femininity in the interwar period. Indeed, the female designer became the ultimate role model and a consumer of a style that fitted the “bright, resourceful, daring, and unprejudiced young woman,” incorporating a strong and independent mind with feminine beauty.56 The association of high fashion with femininity that designers embodied through their image and work turned the career woman from a threat into a positive and fashionable figure. Yet, in presenting the female designer as a desirable role model for the average consumer, magazines did not just popularize fashion design as a career for women, they popularized careers in general. Paid labor was recognized not only as a temporary stage in women’s life or as a marker of working-class status but as a respectable path for the middle-class woman. In a 1934 Vogue spread titled “Beauty and Four Women,” the “Business Woman” and the woman on a “Limited Income” joined the “Leisured Lady” and the “Globe-Trotter” as archetypes of beauty, modernity, and progress.57 No longer a curiosity, the pursuit of a business career became a legitimate, even desired, aspect of womanhood for both Whites and Blacks.

Magazines appealed directly to the young working woman, giving her advice on how to pick the right colleges, to apply for a job, to handle office etiquette, and of course, how to maintain a suitable wardrobe.58 In 1936, for example, the Pictorial Review published a spread titled the “The Busy Woman’s Wardrobe Does 24 Hours Duty,” giving women sartorial solutions for working, shopping, and meeting friends.59 Department stores also began featuring suitable work attire in their windows, quite literally selling the notion of career-oriented femininity as a desirable aspect.60 By 1941, new magazines appeared



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