"Grace Hartigan's Grand Street Brides: The Modern Bride as Mannequin" (original) (raw)
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To be a gentlewoman: shifts in the representation of women of fashion
Global Fashion Conference London, 2018
Over the past decade, representations of women in fashion have gained in naturalness and "authenticity". Old concepts of "prettiness" and conventional attractiveness are being invalidated. Fashion that plays to the female gaze is the latest form of status-seeking. In order to understand these shifts, this paper unpacks representational strategies of the influential niche title The Gentlewoman that constructs the image of the modern, independent, honest, interesting, hard-working and stylish woman. The magazine advertises itself as the place "where real women, real events and real things are enjoyed" [1]. The idea is that we are tired of "fake" fashion and trivialised representations of women; we are looking for something "real". But as Simone de Beauvoir has articulated, once a woman is "dressed", she is "the character she represents, but is not" (Beauvoir 1997: 547). What approaches are used to represent a woman in fashion media without "emptying" her specificity? How many manipulations can be made to still represent a woman as "authentic" without reducing her to the "image"? This paper scrutinises the concept of the "gentlewoman". The theoretical ground for the research is a social semiotic theory of representation. The paper explores both written and visual excerpts and employs techniques of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (drawing on the work of Kress and van Leeuwen). The paper analyses how particular semiotic choices signify "authentic" women and their values. The magazine The Gentlewoman uses a conversational, professional, yet playful tone and emotionally resonant photography to encourage the reader to feel sympathy and warmth towards the "gentlewoman". As the paper claims, the idea of "sincere simulations" has gained significance in contemporary fashion discourse. As a result, the list of characteristics of representations of the "real" woman of fashion is introduced.
2010
"They opened up a whole new world", or something like it, was a phrase I heard repeatedly when I spoke to women about their memories of magazine reading in the interwar years. How the magazine operated as an imaginative window, a frame, space or mirror for encountering, shaping, negotiating, rethinking, rejecting, mocking, enjoying, the self and others became the central question driving this thesis. The expansion of domestic 'service' magazines in the 1920s responded to and developed a new female readership amongst the middle classes and working-class women, preparing the way for high-selling mass-market publications. The multiple models of modern womanhood envisaged in magazines, meanwhile, from the shocking 'lipstick girl' of the mid-1920s to the 1930s 'housewife heroine', show that what being a woman and modern in the period meant was far from settled, changed over time and differed according to a magazine's ethos and target readership. In a period that witnessed the introduction of the franchise for women, divorce legislation, birth control, the companionate marriage, cheap mortgages, a marriage bar in the workplace, growth in the number of single
Describing the Dress of Women: Author’s Notes on the Development of Gender
2020
This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women's clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how they view their place in the world. I work primarily through the writing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but use George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to give contextual contrast to my arguments. In addition, I employ a variety of methods of literary theory, drawing primarily from a cultural materialist and Marxist perspective of embodiment and means, but also diving into esoteric views of literary narratives, fashion theory, and the history of fashion. I conclude that the patriarchal imposition placed upon women's garments is emblematic of the historical, patriarchal oppression. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, a big "no thank you" goes to the Coronavirus, for truly delaying the completion of my thesis. But a big thank you for saving me money on my regalia. My thesis would not have been able to be completed without the guidance and help of fellow Northeast Ohioan Professor David Humphries who took me on without ever having met me, and really stepped in and helped me turn a million ideas into one cohesive thesis. I also owe Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Kathy Koutsis for helping me when I thought all was lost at the beginning of the semester, and also for their guidance throughout my academic career at The Graduate Center. I would be remiss if I did not mention the guidance of Professor Blanche Cook, who has been an inspiration to me at The Graduate Center, a friend, and mentor. I want to thank Professor Elizabeth Wissinger for introducing me to fashion theory, and how it can be applied in more areas than just lace and dresses. And I want to thank Professor Jean O'Malley for inspiring me to explore developmental gendered embodiment, and for giving me the courage to look to myself for expertise in the area. Also, thank you to my husband and kids who ate a lot of takeout as I wrote this, and my husband who bought me a Nespresso machine just for the occasion.
This dissertation provides an examination of the cultural significance of mannequins during the interwar years. As women grew increasingly visible outside of domestic roles subsequent to the First World War and emerging trends for streamlined and practical fashion posed an assault on traditional ideals of femininity, this thesis questions why it was that mannequins became suddenly more realistic than those seen in previous decades.