Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion

by Parkins, Ilya; Sheehan, Elizabeth M.

• ISBN13: 9781611680010
• ISBN10: 1611680018
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-07-12
• Publisher: Univ of New Hampshire

Summary

Grounded in the ubiquitous, ever-changing matter of fashion, Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion places women at the heart of modern culture. This rich and cohesive collection demonstrates how fashion shaped and emerged from diverse cultures of femininity and modernity. By recovering fashion as a dynamic and far-reaching force in culture and politics, the volume examines the nuanced and conflicted terrain of femininity from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Revealing fashion's inextricability with modern life, the volume argues for placing gender, everyday life, and materiality at the forefront of our accounts of modernity. This transatlantic and truly interdisciplinary collection, with an afterword by distinguished literary scholar Rita Felski, is also notable for its mix of established and emerging scholars. The contributors address diverse aspects of women's engagement with fashion in modernity, through such topics as Sapphic architecture, tea gowns, secondhand clothing, transnational identity, the coquette, nursing uniforms, and Harlem Renaissance photographs. Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion traces a unique and often surprising history of modernity and its entwinement with the gendered phenomenon of fashion.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion	p. 1
Fashion and Relationships among Modern Women
Fashioning Sapphic Architecture	p. 19
A Domesticated Exoticism: Fashioning Gender in Nineteenth-Century British Tea Gowns	p. 45
Smart Clothes at Low Prices: Alliances and Negotiations in the British Interwar Secondhand Clothing Trade	p. 71
Fashion and Cultural Anxiety
Fear of Fashion; or, How the Coquette Got Her Bad Name	p. 89
The Discerning Eye: Viewing the Mid-Victorian ôModernö Woman	p. 103
ôHousewife or Harlotö: Art, Fashion, and Morality in the Paris Salon of 1868	p. 124
Fashion and the Materiality of Gender
ôTheir Uniforms All Esthetic and Antisepticö: Fashioning Modern Nursing Identity, 1870-1900	p. 151
The Face of Fashion: Race and Fantasy in James VanDerZee's Photography and Jessie Fauset's Fiction	p. 180
ôMore Than a Garmentö: Edna Ferber and the Fashioning of Transnational Identity	p. 203
Afterword	p. 231
Contributors	p. 239
Index	p. 241
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