Documenting Fashion: Dress and Visual Culture in 1920s and 1930s America

This is the story of clothes as pictures and of the importance and meanings of the way we picture clothes.

Focusing on the rapid changes of the interwar period, fashion is explored as a sensory interplay of images. From illustrations to editorial spreads, and amateur snapshots to Hollywood film, Documenting Fashion considers how American fashion was represented and created by visual culture. The chapters comprise thematic case studies of interconnected images that build to create a discussion of fashion as embodied experience, foregrounding the way that all viewers are also wearers, consuming magazines and other types of images, just as they purchase clothing and accessories.

Examining how mediums constructed and impacted the meaning of fashion during the 1920s and 1930s, the book tracks interconnections between technologies that developed in, for example, handheld cameras and Technicolor and Kodachrome color film. Aspects of photography itself are also considered such as hybrid and manipulated images, as well as light, shadow and colour’s impact on depictions of fashion and the body. Newspapers, fashion and women’s magazines such as Vogue and The Delineator are analysed alongside examples from the Black media, including Abbott’s Monthly Magazine and The Afro-American.

Conceived as a revisionist history, diverse types of images of Black, white and Chinese Americans are analysed to argue for a more rounded examination of the ways dress, style and self-image were represented in still and moving images and how such imagery created a particularly American vision of vernacular modernity.

Rebecca Arnold is a historian who has held posts at The Courtauld Institute, Royal College of Art & Central Saint Martins, London, UK. Her publications include The American Look, Fashion: A Very Short Introduction, and Avedon Advertising with Laura Avedon and James Martin.