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| ISBN-13: | 9781478002147 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/11/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
From the Artist's Model to the Photographic Model
CONTAINING SEXUALITY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
Today, when one uses the term "model," most people think of the fashion model. And truly, this association does make sense: the editorial fashion model has garnered the most press attention, especially since the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s. But historically, the model emerged from the artist's atelier and came of age in the interwar years, when photography transformed advertising, creating an industry demand for photographic models. In this chapter, I sketch out some of the meanings of the term "model" in the first decades of the twentieth century, charting the shift from the older, nineteenth-century artist's model to the emergence of the photographic model in the first decades of the twentieth century. The turn to photography affected the fashion industry, of course, but it also revolutionized print advertising for the consumer products that exploded onto the American scene in the prosperous 1920s, including automobiles, radios, toothpaste, refrigerators, soap, rugs, perfume, cosmetics, and pianos. With the rise of photography within advertising and fashion in the interwar years, a market developed for actors or types to appear in these commercial narratives. Within fashion, in particular, a queer photographic aesthetic pioneered by Condé Nast's first paid staff photographer, Baron Adolph de Meyer, transformed how models were represented in the pages of the new fashion magazines. Quickly thereafter, John Robert Powers founded the first modeling agency in order to represent these new cultural workers, and sell their labor to art directors and photographers, who began working with models on shoots for everything from furs to furniture. Members of the public began to encounter the new figure, the model, in the pages of the illustrated press, the cinema, and especially on the stage — a development I discuss in more detail in the following chapter. Working in dialogue with both photographers and the new modeling agencies, models played a central role in producing a commercialized zone of public discourse that linked gender, class, and racial meanings to commodity forms, and in which sexuality became inextricably linked to the marketing and sale of goods.
Artist's Models and Cloak Models: Working-Class Femininity on the Make
Before the early twentieth century, US merchants or dressmakers would display clothing on an inanimate store fixture, often made of wax, which the French called mannequins. The Americans used the term "manikin" as well (spelled in myriad ways), but throughout the nineteenth century the term referred to a model of human anatomy, such as those used in nineteenth-century natural history demonstrations. Up until World War I, with the exception of the artist's model, the term "model," in both English and French, referred not to the human being but to the material goods — the dress, coat, or corset — being sold. As with the early twentieth-century term "typewriter," which once referred to the woman who operated the machine, this new term slipped between a description of the object and the person, as new aspects of human behavior and subjectivity became organized through the market. By about 1908, the terms formerly used to describe the object — the model — migrated to the person, and trade accounts of department store merchandising, as well as the general press, began referencing "living models," which by the late second decade of the twentieth century had become simply "models."
Before the 1920s, the term "model" — when referencing a woman — connoted a number of related social types, all of which implied a form of sexuality at odds with Victorian (and Edwardian) mores. The figure most closely identified with the term in the period before World War I was the artist's model. The term "artist's model" described a woman (rarely if ever a man) who was part of the demimonde — a woman of bohemian leanings who would be willing to undress for money, and perhaps do more. Models were working-class women who began assuming the modeling stand in artists' Parisian ateliers in the 1860s; while artists and models did not necessarily pose nude to suggest immodesty, or as an erotic prelude, popular discourse constructed the artist's model as a working-class woman whose chastity was easily compromised. A sympathetic portrait of this type was immortalized in George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), in which the beautiful artist's model Trilby O'Farrell falls under the sinister spell of the musician Svengali. Another popular example was Pierrette, the poor model for Pierrot, the "hungry, discouraged artist" hero of the much-performed pantomime "Le Réveillon de Pierrette," which later served as a model for the plot for Lady Duff Gordon's 1917 fashion show/theatre piece "Fleurette's Dream at Peronne."
As these brief examples suggest, the stock character of the "artist's model" was seen as primarily a French import, in which the "artist's model" had become a figure in the public imagination with the rise of mass media and panorama literature during the 1830s and 1840s. In the US context, some representations of the artist's model allowed popular cultural representations of the lightly clad female form to avoid obscenity charges, as suggested by the popularity of early films concerning a variety of models, such as The Substitute Model (1912) and The Model's Redemption (1913). As bohemian tastes migrated to the middle class, the romanticized version of the artist's model fueled the "living pictures" of the nineteenth century through the second decade of the twentieth century and Ben Ali Haggin's extraordinary popular patriotic spectacles for the Ziegfeld Follies, discussed briefly in the following chapter. The middlebrow appreciation for the artist's model continued through the late 1920s, resulting in, for example, a series of images and texts depicting "artists and their models" in the US women's magazine Redbook.
Another important site for the development of the model as person was the European couture establishment. As Caroline Evans has shown, while European dressmakers had also displayed their new clothing models on wax or wooden dummies, the British-born, Paris-based couturier Charles Frederick Worth learned how living models could showcase the way movement animated the goods on display. Worth was a salesman for the most famous mercers of Paris, Gagelin, where young women, known as demoiselles de magasin, displayed shawls and mantles (the only ready-to-wear clothing items) for prospective buyers. These young women were proto house models, and Worth married one of them: Marie Vernet. With his wife Marie as house mannequin, Worth opened his own couture establishment in 1858, where he soon became the dominant couturier for the court of Napoleon III; Charles and Marie imported the mannequin parade from Gagelin while developing a new practice of having on staff several mannequins who were available to put on a dress for the client's inspection. The massive scope of Worth's business (by 1871 he had a staff of twelve hundred), combined with his innovation of having each dress available in several colors, meant that he needed more mannequins, or house models, to parade them before the princesses and duchesses who flocked to his establishment. (And because society expected every elite woman to wear a new gown to each social occasion, as well as to change her wardrobe up to six times daily, noblewomen visited Worth's with great frequency.)
But as Elizabeth A. Wissinger has argued about these early house models, there wasn't anything particularly glamorous about them. These working-class women merely had to be able to be somewhat polite to the clients and walk in a straight line. The house model's working life combined frenetic fittings leading up to a society ball, for example, with boredom and exhaustion. Some house models worked for designers who created clothes directly on the body; these models posed for hours, for little wages. Other models waited, perfectly groomed, until a client arrived, only then moving into a calm frenzy of quick fittings. House mannequins wore, over their corsets yet underneath their couture clothing, a high-necked black silk satin fourreau, designed to cover the skin and highlight the couture design. These mannequins were meant to be walking clothes dummies; they did not speak to clients and, like other servants to the well-to-do, were meant to be simultaneously present and invisible. The mannequin was, as Caroline Evans has argued, a "living object," an animated wax doll or show-window dummy who transgressed the borders between human and machine, woman and automaton. Because the term "manikin" translates as "little man," as the French writer Colette observed, the mannequin's "very sex is dubious"; she is, in other words, a trans figure in multiple, contemporary senses of the word.
It wasn't until the French designer Paul Poiret and the British designer Lucile began to cultivate the models' look, walk, and affect that public fascination with couture models began to develop outside the rarified space of the couture salon. Poiret understood that the model's affective engagement with his couture designs was essential to their success. He wrote in 1931 of the term "manniquin" that "the word is very ill chosen," as it failed to capture the model's corporeal work. "A mannequin is not that wooden instrument," he wrote, "unprovided with a head or heart, on which clothes are hung as on a clothes hanger." Rather, he argued, "The living mannequin is a woman who must be more feminine than all other women. She must react beneath a model [couture design], in spirit soar in front of the idea that is being born from her own form, and by her gestures and pose, by the entire expression of her body, she must aid the laborious genesis of the new creation." As designers began to cultivate the mannequin as a feminine avatar of sartorial creativity, she began, as fashion historian Diana de Marly has argued, to replace "the seamstress and the shop girl in the imagination of the predatory male as the sort of girl who was ripe for seduction but not for marriage."
As mannequins began to be employed by department stores and other manufacturers of ready-made clothing, they modeled for the trade that, in New York, developed on Seventh Avenue. In the years surrounding World War I, these wholesale models were known as "cloak models": they demonstrated ready-to-wear clothing for wholesale buyers, and would then sometimes entertain these out-of-town gentlemen after hours. Although the cloak model, or wholesale model, continued as a profession after World War I, it was the introduction of the cloak model to American audiences (often through literary and stage representation through, for example, a short story by O. Henry or a Montague Glass stage play) that paved the way for retail mannequins in the post–World War I years. Out-of-town male (often married) wholesale buyers would visit wholesale ready-to-wear manufacturers where the chief of the manufacturer's showroom would demonstrate the firm's clothing "models" on the living model, one of several young women kept on staff to parade the clothing for the buyer's review. In New York City in 1916, for example a wholesale maker of suits for larger women kept on staff sixteen models. In a typical day, the models appeared at the wholesale showroom at 8:30 a.m. to put on the clothing models available for sale; at 9:00 a.m., when the buyers arrived, the firm's models would "parade" the clothing in a mass market adaptation of the couturier's fashion show, developed some years earlier in Europe, and introduced to the United States in 1908. In between parades before prospective buyers, the models would also help out the firm's sales efforts by folding advertising circulars or hanging completed clothing.
In the wholesale trade during these years, the audience for the manikin parade consisted primarily of the buyers for a retail venue, such as a department store. Historically, most (but not all of) these buyers were men. Modeling became a key site for the elaboration of commercialized forms of heterosexual exchange that emerged with the rise of mass culture and urban forms of leisure in the early twentieth-century United States. Although few sources in this early period discuss the informal sexual expectations concerning such commercial exchanges directly, there is some indication that models were either expected, or chose, to socialize with the buyers outside the showroom. As one model wrote, despite arguing that it was a myth that models entertained buyers as part of their work, "I'm not saying that I've never gone to dinner or the theater with an out-of-town buyer, and I'm not even saying that, having gone with one of them, he hasn't tried to kiss me good night." Some models anticipated these visits by the out-of-town buyers as a perfect opportunity for an all-expenses-paid night on the town, as well as a chance to pick up a few "gifts" of cosmetics or other consumer items.
In an article detailing her work as a retail and wholesale dress model, "Nellie" described two of her colleagues that, in her view, fit the "conventional idea of models." These women, she said, though pretty in a conventional way, overdid their rouge and powder — both of which were just becoming acceptable for young women, but which still retained their theatrical (and sexually available) connotations. "Their sole object in life was to have a good time, and their pride was to graft as much as possible from the various young men of their acquaintance. They would spend hours boasting of how they had lured last night's swain into a drug store and held him up for a bottle of expensive perfume and a whole array of cosmetics. Yet," Nellie continued, "they were good girls who would have slapped the face of any youth who misinterpreted their motives." The author of this Saturday Evening Post article used the pseudonym of "Nellie" to signify the "about town" model, fictionalized in the popular Broadway production "Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model" (1906); from 1906 through the mid-1920s, the term "Nellie the cloak model" was shorthand for working-class femininity on the make. As one observer noted in 1930, the cloak model of this era was fundamentally also a sexual hostess for out-of-town buyers: "It was generally conceded that their daytime work was supplanted by labor after office hours," to such an extent that "outdoor evangelists included 'cloak models' in their litany of brazen sinners."
These models were fundamentally "charity girls," working-class women participating in the commercialization of sexuality known as "treating" in the years surrounding World War I. As historians Kathy Peiss and Elizabeth Alice Clement have argued, working-class men and women developed the courtship practice as part of the growth of commercialized forms of leisure in early twentieth-century cities. Working-class women who worked outside the home, unlike the men in their family, often turned over their entire pay packet to their mothers, as a contribution to the family economy. This dutiful practice, however, left them without the funds to participate in the emerging mass consumer culture, identified in "Nellie's" anecdote as cosmetics but also including movies, dance halls, and other forms of commercial entertainment. Working-class women would often exchange sexual favors for a night on the town or the purchase of "gifts"; as there was no exchange of money, no one (except vice reformers) saw the practice as related to prostitution. By the 1920s, this commodified set of expectations (the man pays; the woman "puts out") became normalized, migrating to the middle-class practice known as "dating." Because of this history, wholesale modeling retained an element of scandal for families shaped by middle-class morals; as the fictional Nellie explained to her readers, when she told her parents she planned to become a dress model, "a riot followed." Nellie herself failed to see the pitfalls; from her perspective, seeking a living as a single girl in New York, she recognized the profession as "the only occupation for unskilled workers that pays a decent wage." Whereas reformers and anxious parents might see modeling as a "hotbed of vice," to quote Nellie, or models as exemplars of a problematic "woman adrift" in the urban landscape, by the early 1920s modeling represented the epitome of independence, femininity, and glamour that a generation of young women identified with a postfeminist, postsuffrage female modernity and consumption.
In the United States, the development of clothing modeling corresponded with the maturation of the department store and the women's ready-to-wear clothing industry. As a result, what had been primarily an intimate and exclusive practice of modeling unique gowns for high-end clients in closed showrooms migrated to free, public displays of ready-to-wear designs for a middle-class audience who viewed models displaying the new fashions in the department store, charity fashion parade, or Broadway show. Both the department store and the high-end couturier shop bore a close relationship to the New York stage in terms of set design, costuming, choreography, and performers (models). In the department stores, as Marlis Schweitzer, Caroline Evans, and William Leach have shown, the growing importance of fashion pushed department store owners to theatrical strategies in merchandising goods. By the early twentieth century, the development of ready-to-wear clothing had catapulted the clothing trade to the third-largest industry in the United States, behind only steel and oil. The entire industry was largely derivative of French fashions before World War I: US wholesalers and retailers sent buyers and other representatives to Paris, who copied the Parisian upper-class trade for the American mass market.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIllustrations xiii
Introduction 1
1. From the Artist's Model to the Photographic Model: Containing Sexuality in the Early Twentieth Century 25
2. Race, Sexuality, and the 1920s Stage Model 69
3. Queering Interwar Fashion: Photographers, Models, and the Queer Production of the "Look" 103
4. Black Models and the Invention of the US: "Negro Market," 1945-1960 163
5. "You've Got to Be Real": Constructing Femininity in the Long 1970s 211
Epilogue 271
Notes 277
Bibliography 313
Index 337
What People are Saying About This
“Rigorously researched and eloquently argued, Work! is a brilliant and unique book that merges theory, method, and empirical historical work to create a new understanding of capitalism, sexuality, and the image. Elspeth H. Brown changes our approach to the history of sexuality and sets a new standard for studies of capitalism and culture.”
“Elspeth H. Brown queers fashion modeling in a much-needed, highly readable way, with anecdotes that will surprise and educate even the most seasoned of fashion studies scholars. Her skill as a historian and nuanced analyst are on clear display through quality scholarship that brings the disparate fields of queer theory, affect studies, and the history of capitalism into fruitful conversation. A must-read for scholars of media and the body!”