Producing Fashion

University of Pennsylvania Press
Chapter Title: Rethinking Fashion

Chapter Author(s): Regina Lee Blaszczyk
Book Title: Producing Fashion

Book Subtitle: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers
Book Editor(s): Regina Lee Blaszczyk
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press. (2008)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhbbd.3
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CHAPTER ONE
Rethinking Fashion
Regina Lee Blaszczyk
"WHAT IS FASHION?" In November 1993, marketing consultant Estelle Ellis

posed this "deceivingly simple question" in a speech at the Fashion Institute
of Technology (FIn in New York. Ellis had spent more than five decades in
the fashion business, launching her career during the late 1940S and early
1950S at Seventeen and Charm magazines, before establishing Business Image
Inc., a creative marketing firm that helped companies to understand how
social change affected business trends. Founded in 1958, Business Image Inc.
had an impressive roster of clients, such as FIT, Carter Hawley Hale Stores,
Conde Nast Publications (including Glamour, House and Garden, and Vogue),
Evan-Picone, Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Kimberly-Clark, and Yves
Saint Laurent Fragrances. With more than fifty years of marketing experi-
ence, Ellis was well qualified to speak about the nature of fashion and to
define it for educators, students, and industry professionals. At FIT, founded
as the "MIT for the fashion industries" in 1944, Ellis faced an expert audi-
ence, but she spoke her mind, undaunted. l
How did Ellis define fashion? Her FIT address is worth examining at
length because it provides a fitting launchpad for this book on how fashion
is produced through the interactions of commerce, culture, and consumers.
Ellis had a broad view of fashion that touched almost everything in the mate-
rial world. She perceived fashion in anthropological terms, that is, as a cul-
tural force that drew sustenance from social customs, group psychology,
2 REGINA LEE BLASZCZYK
material life, economic institutions, and other types of human interaction

and, in turn, influenced them. In her eyes, fashion found its fullest expression
in four areas of culture: "mode-the way we dress; manners-the way we
express ourselves; mores-the way we live; and markets-the way we are de-
fined demographically and psychologically." Looking at the world through
the lenses of these Four M's, Ellis understood fashion simply and directly,
that is, as a causal agent that constantly reshaped all material things, from
"the fabric environments which surround our bodies" to "the nature of de-
sign and architecture." Fashion, Ellis persuasively argued, was like a perpetual
motion machine, always busy, always moving, and always recontouring
"daily living, whether in the home, office, institution, or community."2
Ellis's definition of fashion, which emphasizes creativity and innovation,
has important ramifications for scholars seeking to understand how fashion
is produced. At first glance, her ideas may seem too inclusive or evanescent
to be useful in historical analysis, but Ellis's clarifYing remarks about the
knottiness of the question "What is fashion?" get to the core of this book's
themes. Speaking at FIT, Ellis hoped to open her audience's eyes to the
material world at large, and to highlight the creative possibilities inherent in
all aspects of design, production, marketing, and merchandising. She under-
stood the fertile fields that waited to be plowed, the benefits of cross-fertilization,
and the wonderful fruit that could be borne by expansive thinking and careful
looking.
The students, teacher-practitioners, and others who may have listened to
Ellis speak at FIT became the future and current producers of fashion. Many
probably aspired to join New York's thriving "creative economy," to become
members of the "creative classes" who generate the sketches, color palettes,
style forecasts, fabric combinations, and design innovations used by manufac-
turers to sew or knit apparel for American consumers and, increasingly, for
global markets. 3 We may never know if anyone who heard "What is fashion?"
graduated from FIT to begin the long journey to design celebrity, following
in the footsteps of sensational Seventh Avenue success stories such as Ralph
Lauren and Donna Karan. 4 Most students listening to Ellis as she lectured at
FIT, however, probably found entry-level jobs behind the scenes in the ap-
parel, beauty, design, publishing, and retailing industries. In these positions,
few would leave their personal imprint on the look and feel of American
style, but collectively they would help to shape and reshape fashion through
their everyday duties and assignments in advertising agencies, apparel compa-
Rethinking Fashion 3
nies, accessories and fragrance licensing, beauty salons, newspapers and pub-
lishing houses, public-relations firms, and television studios.
With this situation in mind, Ellis sought to encourage and inspire cre-
ativity among the rank and file who would soon help the gears of the fashion
business to mesh. AB a highly successful creative professional, Ellis took her
cues from anywhere in the culture where ideas, values, emotions, and mean-
ings percolated. She reminded students that it was important not to lose sight
of the big picture, eschewing the Marxist and postmodern analyses of fashion
that dominated academic discourse at the time. Ellis spoke at a moment
when the theories of French semiotician Roland Barthes, who had interro-
gated the "fashion system" as an expression of bourgeois values, generated
and sustained by the media, enjoyed wide currency in American universities.
Put simply, Barthes had argued that the mass media constructed certain vi-
sual priorities as "truth," advancing representations that furthered the bour-
geoisie's social position. The media helped invent bourgeois tastes and to
define them as "tradition," even though these tropes had no foundation in
nature and few precedents in histoty. In Barthes's interpretation, which was
ideologically sympathetic to the Marxist belief in the irreconcilable differ-
ences between capital and labor, everything was about the struggle for
power. 5 In contrast, Ellis took a more pragmatic and far less sinister position
on fashion, its meaning, and its production. Her straightforward understand-
ing has ramifications for this historical study of how fashion has been created.
AB a former fashion editor, Ellis certainly understood the persuasive
power of the mass media, acknowledging the emotive sway that photographs
of sexy young models in glamorous settings could have on human desire and
shoppers' motivations. Visual seduction was the stock-in-trade of fashion
photography; verbal enticement, the forte of fashion editors. But Ellis knew
that the media hype was only part of the story, and that something more
important needed to be emphasized in her talk that day at FIT.
Ellis saw fashion as something other than a media extravaganza that
celebrated big-name designers, anorexic supermodels, and trendy wardrobes
in Vogue or Esquire. For her, fashion reached beyond apparel, clothing, and
dress. She had long understood it to be a visual and material system of sym-
bols and meanings that extended to all things produced by people, from hats
to goods for the home. All these artifacts were suspended in and connected
by the gel popularly known as "culture," so that changes to one family of
objects might reverberate and have an impact on other types. When innova-
tions bubbled up among an object group such as shoes or housewares, a chain
reaction could occur if the visual or material shift resonated in the culture,
that is, if it touched the emotions and stirred the imaginations of other cre-
ators, retailers, publishers, and consumers. New products that struck a chord
in popular culture or that found fans in a niche market could initiate a sea
change across the board, affecting a range of goods, materials, applications,
and settings. 6
There was no predetermined pattern to this process of producing fash-
ion, but those in the business could learn to discern the ebb and flow; some
could even anticipate the most likely future scenarios.? Everything was subject
to changes in style: architecture and automobiles, kitchen gadgets and kids'
clothing, furniture and personal grooming products. In mode and mores, fash-
ion could be fickle, like the 1960s fad for the miniskirt fed by the decade's
rebellious but ephemeral youth culture; but it also could be enduring, like
the manners that dictated silverware, white table linen, and fine china for
wedding banquets and somber black clothes for funerals and mourning. De-
pending on the market segment, fashion in apparel might be elite and expen-
sive like Parisian haute couture, or democratic and affordable like the ready-
to-wear that made Seventh Avenue world famous. Sometimes, it could be
both high and low, integrating highbrow elements in mass-market designs.
Some styles fed on elite culture, some on popular culture; some trickled
down, while some bubbled up from below, as ordinary people sought to
express their individuality in dress or to personalize their surroundings.
This multidirectional flow had consequences for those who worked or
hoped to work in the business of fashion. Everything was fair game for the
people who designed the goods, ran the manufacturing companies, worked
as retail buyers for chain stores, modeled the clothes, designed the photo
shoots, published the glamour magazines, surveyed consumers for marketing
studies, waited on customers in the shoe department, and so forth. All prod-
ucts-appliances, cars, clothes, jewelry, houses, home furnishings, and mov-
ies-were subject to the cultural force known as changing fashion. Those
whose livelihoods depended on the design, production, marketing, advertis-
ing, and sale of goods would be wise to heed the vagaries of style and taste,
in whatever form these elements materialized.
Ellis's catholic viewpoint, which valued fashion writ large, opens the
doors to the analysis of fashion as form of cultural production, as the richly
textured interplay between economic institutions and private individuals, so-
cial trends and belief systems, entrepreneurs and tastemakers, marketers and
consumers. Historical analysis that pivots on the fundamental premise that
fashion affects all types of products has the potential to be remarkably illumi-
nating.BIt can show how fashion-styles, trends, modes, and other manifesta-
tions of beliefs, values, ideas, manners, and mores-took hold in all aspects of
material life. Most important for this book, Ellis knew that business played a
foundational role in creating, establishing, and maintaining fashion. Just as
it would be folly to overlook modes, manners, and mores, it would be foolish
to ignore markets.
Business History Meets the Fashion System
Ellis offered an amazingly open-minded view of fashion, one that challenged

her audience-and subsequent scholars who might read her lecture notes-to
"think big" when contemplating fashion. Yet, the voices of businesspeople
like Ellis are largely, but not exclusively, missing from the annals of fashion
history. Over the past thirty years, fashion history pioneers have broached
territory often dismissed as "frivolous" by the academy, establishing the study
of apparel and dress as a serious scholarly discipline. Much of this bold new
work has focused on haute couture designers, clothing as material culture,
and the role of sexuality and sensuality in sartorial expression. Less is known
about the commercial institutions of the fashion and beauty businesses, or
the interface between enterprise, culture, and consumers in producing fash-
ion. This book pursues a new line of inquiry by primarily, but not exclusively,
examining how economic institutions shaped Western fashion from the early
nineteenth century to our own time.
To do so, this volume draws on new work in business history that seeks
to understand connections among enterprise, society, and culture. Rooted in
the Business History Conference, the largest international organization of
business historians, and the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Tech-
nology, and Society, this scholarship on American enterprise posits alterna-
tives to the powerful institutional paradigms that dominated business history
until the 1990s.9 Particularly relevant to this book is scholarship on innova-
tion. A new group of business historians have drawn on models and theories
in economics, design history, cultural studies, and other disciplines to exam-
ine the creative process that leads to innovation and the mechanisms for the
dissemination of novelty. They have examined the ways in which firms inno-
vate, looking at the paths that feed data into companies, how corporate actors
sift through new ideas, the interactions that result in new goods, and the
strategies for promoting them.lO
In my contributions to this literature, I have focused on consumer prod-
uct innovation for the American mass market, looking at the micro-level
process of design through a magnifYing lens to understand macro-level rela-
tionships among business enterprise and consumer society. Specifically, my
work on the politics of the design and the process of creativity has shown
how networks of business professionals that I call "fashion intermediaries"
studied the marketplace, collected data about consumer taste, created prod-
ucts to meet public expectations, and promoted them. Their efforts often
succeeded, but failed when the design antennae pointed away from the mar-
ket channelY In this model, the high-profile industrial-design consultants
celebrated in museum exhibitions are less important than the thousands of
corporate professionals-art directors, retail buyers, home economists, and
magazine editors-who worked behind the scenes to produce and reproduce
cultural forms. Fashion intermediaries often coexisted side by side with these
tastemakers, their horns often locked over whether it was best to reshape taste
or to respond to it. Tastemakers such as industrial designer Raymond Loewy
wanted to uplift mass taste and sometimes to remake consumers in their own
image, while fashion intermediaries like Lucy M. Maltby, a home economist
who helped Corning Glass Works create Pyrex, were more accepting of ordi-
nary people's preferences. Put simply, tastemakers sought to reform consumer
taste, fashion intermediaries to mediate the relationship between producers
and consumers and help companies better understand demand. 12 Using the
concept of the "fashion intermediary," my approach homes in on the experi-
ences, practices, and ideas of businesspeople like Estelle Ellis-folks often on
the corporate front line, who were charged with the tasks of scoping out
consumer tastes and determining the likely direction of change.
How did innovative networks foster creativity in the apparel trade, the
industry most often associated with fashion per se? By thinking expansively,
we can find compelling evidence in seemingly unlikely places. The histories
of New York's Seventh Avenue fashion district and the American synthetic
fibers industry, particularly in the post-World War II era, shed some light on
the puzzle. During the golden age of American capitalism, large corporations
wrestled with the conundrum of fashion in a major way when industrial
chemists generated new polymers that promised to revolutionize the look
and feel of fabrics and clothing. To perfect these synthetic fibers, chemical
companies not only had to overcome technical hurdles in the laboratory and
the factory, but also had to determine what consumers liked and disliked
about their everyday apparel. Fiber giants like E. 1. du Pont de Nemours &
Company added complex marketing packages, complete with staff knowl-
edgeable about menswear and women's wear to help guide the way. By the
1960s, DuPont had a sophisticated marketing department, with major offices
in New York and Geneva. DuPont's in-house fashion intermediaries con-
ducted market-research surveys, talked regularly with retail buyers from all
around the United States (who routinely visited New York's garment district
to purchase stock for their stores), and networked with garment manufactur-
ers, all with the goal of fathoming consumer expectations. Back in Wilming-
ton, DuPont scientists used this feedback to improve fiber performance and
the aesthetic appeal of the new synthetics. Meanwhile, DuPont marketers
forged new contacts in the fashion world, hiring French haute couturiers-
tastemakers par excellence-to give synthetics high-style appeal and collabo-
rating with Seventh Avenue garment makers to translate those Parisian
designs into mass-market apparel (Figure 1.1). This example shows how taste-
makers and fashion intermediaries coexisted and sometimes collaborated in
the quest to find new markets and expand existing ones. When technology
and style met, everything was fair game. 13
This brief DuPont story presents a model of networked innovation,
business-culture interaction, and consumer mediation that has important im-
plications for the study of fashion history. Just as businesses making house-
hold goods had to "imagine their consumers," so, too, companies in the
fashion trades had to be in constant touch with the marketplace. Whether
the product was chain-store house dresses, synthetic fibers that went into
everyday fabrics, or haute couture for an elite clientele, creators who were
successfol kept tabs on their customers. In turn, a matrix of cultural institu-
tions informed consumers, from factory workers to Wall Street brokers, polit-
ical wives, and jet-setters. Just as interactions between organizations, objects,
ideas, and individuals meshed to create stylish consumer durables, parallel
occurrences produced the cultural value known as fashion, and the goods
that were fashionable.
On the Shoulders of Fashion-History Giants
In recent decades, fashion history has blossomed into a thriving field, attract-
ing scholars from anthropology, sociology, history, home economics, cultural
Figure I.I. In fashion, high culture can mesh with mass culture. In 1954, French
couturier Hubert de Givenchy designed this pret-a.-porter dress using fabrics made
from DuPont's synthetic fibers. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library.
studies, and fashion design. Building on insights from earlier studies by cura-
tors and connoisseurs of dress and costume, a new generation of scholars has
situated fashion within broader historical and cultural frameworks. But few
have examined the economic and institutional practices of the fashion system.
The fashion-history literature is vast, and this summary focuses on studies
relevant to the project at hand.
Historians and curators who study fashion have often focused on aesthet-
ics, meaning, and use. Along these lines, major historians include Valerie
Steele, Kathy Peiss, and Christopher Breward, who have adapted methods
and theories from cultural studies to study clothing fashions in relation to
sexuality, gender, beauty, and culture. 14 A sophisticated material-culture ap-
proach is taken by Dilys E. Blum, Alexandra Palmer, and Lou Taylor, whose
scholarship on the cultural significance of clothing blends archival research
with the careful analysis of costume collections. 15 More recently, cultural
studies has energetically contributed to the mix, particularly with the 1997
introduction of the scholarly journal Fashion Theory and the expansion of
Berg's "Dress, Body, Culture" list. Historians now know a good deal about
French and Italian haute couture; fads like mod, hip-hop, and other bubble-
up street styles; the impact of Nazism and Fascism on sartorial trends; and
the various ways consumers used, adapted, or rejected all of this. 16
Sociologists of culture have also produced insightful studies, blending
rigorous research with theoretical analysis. For example, Diana Crane and
Yuniya Kawamura have studied the social nature of fashion, examining the
people, networks, and institutions that make up the "fashion system."I? They
have shown how fashion professionals, including designers and magazine edi-
tors, and dissemination mechanisms, such as advertising, operated in this
milieu to generate the concept and practice of fashion. Both scholars debunk
the myth of the fashion designer as a creative genius. They instead emphasize
fashion as a collective activity-the output of deliberation, conflict, and ne-
gotiation within a complex network of institutions and individuals-and as
a symbolic product that anchors cultural dreams and social aspirations. This
work is most sympathetic to my approach to the business history of design
and innovation.
In addition, costume curators, fashion-industry practitioners, and busi-
ness journalists have examined some economic aspects of the fashion indus-
try. Claudia Kidwell and Margaret B. Christman's landmark Smithsonian
Institution exhibition, "Suiting Everyone," set the stage by surveying the
mass-market clothing trade from colonial times through the 1970s. In Yeshiva
University's 2005 exhibition, "A Perfect Fit," curators Gabriel M. Goldstein

and Phyllis Dillon built on this tradition to examine the role ofJewish entre-
preneurs in America's mass-market garment industry.18 For contemporary
history, Nicola White and Ian Griffiths's The Fashion Business is often cited
as a seminal work. In this book, scholars and fashion experts, many compara-
ble to Estelle Ellis, offer different perspectives on the trade, focusing primar-
ily, but not exclusively, on the recent past. Finally, Teri Agins's masterful The
End ofFashion provides insight into the contemporary global fashion business
from the perspective of the Wall Street Journal. 19
This Book
Like other books in the Hagley Perspectives Series, this volume examines the
subject at hand-in this case, the history of fashion-as a topic linking busi-
ness enterprise and economic culture to broader historical trends. It is driven
by a set of intertwined questions about the relationships among people, styles,
and things: What is fashion? Who determines what is "in" and what is "out"?
How do the interactions among commerce, culture, and consumers produce
different fashions and help to disseminate them, sustain them, and contribute
to their "going out of fashion"? Taking a historical perspective, this volume
contains more than a dozen original essays about the creation of fashion in
the West from the nineteenth century to the present. It looks at the organiza-
tional frameworks that buttressed the fashion business and the style industries
over the longue duree; considers how various types of producers, from maga-
zine editors to multinational corporations, interacted with the marketplace;
and examines how consumers welcomed new styles created for them or, alter-
natively, reshaped fashion to suit themselves.
Much like other volumes in the series, the book builds on an extant body
of literature while offering new viewpoints rooted in the study of economic
culture. It does this by blending models of business innovation as a social
and cultural practice with paradigms in fashion history, design history, and
anthropology that emphasize meaning and aesthetics. The presence of con-
tributors from history, anthropology, fashion studies, and other fields diversi-
fies the perspective. Fashion is a cultural phenomenon growing out of the
interactions of individuals and institutions. Business has long played an im-
portant role in fashion-shaping the look of artifacts and helping to define
the parameters for what is generally considered to be fashionable-and enter-
Rethinking Fashion II
prise often takes cues from the marketplace, where ideas about style percolate
from different sites and circulate through the culture. Fashion producers have
to "imagine the consumer." Trickle-down theories about fashion emulation,
which long dominated the literature, can only partly explain change. Al-
though much depends on the time, place, and product, fashion is far more
complicated than emulation theories postulate. Business history has shown
that successful firms, particularly those in the style industries, can shape taste,
but they must also heed customs and emerging practices in target markets.
All the essays in this book deal with the themes of "producing fashion"
and "imagining consumers." They have been grouped in ways that will facili-
tate classroom discussion about how different disciplinary approaches and
research techniques can shed light on various themes and shape scholarly
conclusions.
Organizing the Fashion Trades
Part I examines some of the business institutions that have historically under-
pinned the fashion system, and considers how these organizations helped
produce the cultural value known as fashion. The chapters acknowledge the
centrality of Paris, the capital of high-end dressmaking, or haute couture, but
also consider how fashion was created in other places and through other
means. Drawing on cases from Russia, Italy, Belgium, and France, they con-
sider fashion magazines as business enterprise, department stores as style mer-
chandisers, trade associations as fashion intermediaries and regulating
agencies, and marketing practices by late twentieth-century couture houses
that struggled to beat the odds in an era that democratized fashion. In
"Spreading the Word: The Development of the Russian Fashion Press,"
Christine Ruane traces the evolution of women's fashion magazines as a busi-
ness enterprise in tsarist Russia. Concerned with modernization, the tsar dic-
tated that a fashionable appearance, based on European prototypes, was the
duty of Russian citizens. Fashion magazines emerged in response to the de-
mand for information about European manners and style, forging a commer-
cial link between Russian readers and the cosmos of continental fashion.
Using evidence from Russian archives, Ruane looks at editors, publishers,
and government censors to consider how changes in the organization of pro-
duction affected the content of the magazines and definitions of what was
fashionable.
The next three essays shift to Western Europe, exploring the business
strategies of fashion makers in Milan, Paris, and Brussels. In "Accessorizing,
Italian Style: Creating a Market for Milan's Fashion Merchandise," fashion
scholar Elisabetta Merlo and business historian Francesca Polese examine ac-
cessories marketing in Milan during the 1880s, when this commercial center
had the highest per capita income in Italy. Using mail-order catalogs pub-
lished by the Grandi Magazzini "Aile Citra d'ltalia," the authors examine the
modalities that created the market for Italian fashion accessories and critique
the standard interpretation of the department store as the "democratizer of
consumption."
Veronique Pouillard's "In the Shadow of Paris? French Haute Couture
and Belgian Fashion Between the Wars" examines the exportation of Paris
fashion to Brussels and its emulation by Belgian dressmakers. A major player
in this effort was the Chambre Syndicale de Haute Couture Belge (Belgian
Syndicate Chamber of Haute Couture), a trade association for retailers and
artisans from Brussels and the Belgian provinces. Member firms performed
as fashion intermediaries, importing models of French dresses, displaying
them in Brussels, and stimulating the demand for copies among the Belgian
bourgeoisie and foreign visitors. Drawing on records from this trade associa-
tion, Pouillard's study complements Ruane's essay by exploring how com-
mercial channels disseminated Parisian fashion in Western Europe.
Tomoko Okawa's essay, "Licensing Practices at Maison Christian Dior,"
considers a little-examined aspect of French fashion's recent history: brand
licensing. Established in 1946, Maison Dior helped to rebuild the French
fashion business after World War II. After Christian Dior's 1957 death, the
maison prospered, garnering its profits primarily from licensing activities in
accessories, such as stockings, scarves, handbags, and neckties. Okawa uses
untapped material from French national collections and the Christian Dior
Couture S.A. Archives, augmenting the essay on Milan by extending the
discussion of accessories into the late twentieth century.
Inventing Fashions, Promoting Styles
Historians of fashion, advertising, and consumerism often use published pri-

mary sources to study how tastemakers created and circulated styles. Part II
examines advertisements, magazine and newspaper articles, and other promo-
tional material to probe unexplored niches in the history of apparel and other
consumer goods. Often these primary sources, created as propaganda, can

illuminate highly public topics such as nationalism, a major theme in two of
the chapters in this section.
In the first essay, "The Wiener Werkstatte and the Reform Impulse," art
historian Heather Hess considers the efforts among Austrian tastemakers to
find a style that embodied the state's ethnic identity. In Vienna, design re-
formers at the Weiner Werkstatte (Viennese Workshop and Production Co-
operative of Art Works) created a new international style in textiles, clothing,
and furnishings by engaging a modern Germanic vocabulary of ornament.
Hess shows how Austrian tastemakers created a new style that epitomized
Vienna, and examines how they used magazines, newspapers, stores, and
exhibitions to publicize the new international look.
Marlis Schweitzer's "American Fashions for American Women: The Rise
and Fall of Fashion Nationalism," examines the ill-fated efforts to establish a
native fashion industry in America during the 191OS. Edward Bok used his
editorship at the Ladies' Home Journal to advocate a break from the dictates
of Paris fashion, which had long dominated the American scene. Schweitzer
considers how Bok and like-minded reformers broke from the dictates of
Paris fashion and promoted their vision of a distinctive American aesthetic
through magazines, dress patterns, and newspapers. The campaign foun-
dered, but presaged more successful mid-century developments as the ready-
to-wear trade expanded.
Ariel Beaujot in "Coifling Vanity: Advertising the Celluloid Toilet Sets
in Twenties America," probes the corporate records ofE. I. du Pont de Nem-
ours Company at the Hagley Museum and Library to analyze the symbolic
meanings of a ubiquitous fashion accessory: the celluloid boudoir set. The
multifaceted history of these artifacts shows how tastemakers' ideas about
womanly self-presentation influenced design, development, and promotion
of fashion accessories. Her judicious analysis of trade advertisements DuPont
circulated to retailers highlights an underused resource in business and cul-
tural history. She also provides a connection to a marvelous Web site, spon-
sored by the University of Toronto, on the material culture of dress and
grooming, which can be used by instructors in conjunction with her essay.20
Shaping Bodies, Building Brands
Scholars acknowledge the importance of gender, sexuality, and bodies to the

construction of consumer identity and the iconography of fashion. Building
on this foundation, Part III examines how cultural ideas about the body
influenced corporate decision makers and how tactics for building brands
produced new prescriptions for gender behavior that were inexorably linked
to fashion. The chapters focus on sites of cultural production that have not
been examined by many fashion historians: the Los Angeles menswear trade,
the post-World War II advertising and modeling businesses, and the textile
fibers department of the nation's leading chemical company. At these sites,
people concerned with building markets for leisurewear, cigarettes, and syn-
thetic fibers redefined the dimensions of masculinity and femininity in ways
that reflected athleticism, flexibility, and modernity. For the most part, these
essays draw on company records, institutional archives, and oral-histoty in-
terviews to provide readers with different viewpoints on bodies, gender, and
the production of fashion.
William R. Scott's "California Casual: Lifestyle Marketing and Men's
Leisurewear, 1930-1960" discusses how a regional style-California casual-
was transformed into a national brand by manufacturers who promoted a
definition of masculinity developed on the West Coast. Drawing on industty
journals and trade association records from the Men's Apparel Guild in Cali-
fornia (MAGIC), Scott shows how promotions and merchandising tech-
niques capitalized on men's disenchantment with sartorial drabness and
helped make resort wear de rigueur. New ideas about men's bodies, masculin-
ity, and leisure lay at the root of these changes.
In "Marlboro Men: Outsider Masculinities and Commercial Modeling
in Postwar America," Elspeth H. Brown offers an American studies analysis
of heteronormative fashion and the male body, focusing on the Leo Burnett
advertising agency, which in 1954 launched a campaign to make Marlboro
"the cigarette with balls." Using oral history interviews conducted in the
1980s by the Archives Center at the Smithsonian National Museum of Ameri-
can History, Brown examines how the Marlboro Man advertising campaign
presented a vision of hypermasculinity that capitalized on and fed into the
segmented market that drew corporate attention in the postwar era. Through
this process, the butch idea of masculinity was linked to the mythical Ameri-
can West and became part of fashion's established iconology.
Finally, anthropologist Kaori O'Connor in "The Body and the Brand:
How Lycra Shaped America" combines materials in the Hagley archives and
oral-history interviews with female consumers to trace Lycra's history from
stretchable elastic for women's girdles to exercise wear. O'Connor's chapter
shows how consumer-driven new uses for spandex redirected the marketing
efforts at a major American corporation. The novel applications were condi-

tioned by feminist ideas about women's bodies and the athletic craze that
surfaced in the Me Decade. The essay provides an excellent lead-in to the
book's next section on consumer agency.
Customer Reactions, Consumer Adaptations
Audience response is a major theme in recent fashion and consumer histories.

Did the public accept, reject, or adapt ideas about fashions that were advo-
cated by producers? How, if at all, did customer reactions redirect the public
discourse about what was "in" and "out"? Earlier essays in this book show
that successful fashion brokers necessarily paid attention to consumer taste,
but the role of consumer choice in shaping fashion is sometimes less appar-
ent. The type of historical source has much to do with whether scholars can
explore the dynamic relationship between consumers and producers, and how
much "power" the consumer appears to exert in the marketplace. The essays
in Part IV use evidence about markets, following customers as they pushed
the style industries to expand the parameters of what was fashionable. In
the classroom, instructors can compare and contrast the consumer-focused
approach here with earlier essays from the viewpoint of the producers.
"French Hairstyles and the Elusive Consumer," by historian Steve
Zdatny, steps into an important site of beauty production-the hair salon-
to scrutinize the testy relationship between Parisian women and their stylists.
By the early 1900s, bottom-up fashions, such as the Marcel wave and the
bob, challenged the hegemony of haute coiffeurs over the hairdo. During
the 1930S, Hollywood exerted powerful sway over stylish Parisiennes; in the
1960s, the youth movement's anti-fashion posture stimulated consumer inter-
est in shorter haircuts. Hairdressers found public taste to be enigmatic, and
consumers difficult, if not impossible, to manipulate.
In "Ripping Up the Uniform Approach: Hungarian Women Piece To-
gether a New Communist Fashion," feminist scholar Katalin Medvedev pulls
back the Iron Curtain to peek at clothing consumers in a totalitarian regime.
The communists in Hungary who saw Western styles as a threat to the new
order created a mode of dress that was nondescript, practical, and comfort-
able. Medvedev shows how women's demands challenged and then reshaped
the state's position on fashion, a powerful example of consumer agency. Aes-
thetics and subversion were weapons in the Hungarian consumers' battle

against cultural repression.
The last essay, "Why the Old-Fashioned Is in Fashion in American
Houses" by historian Susan J. Matt, extends the definition of fashion to the
home. Matt compares the consumer demand for houses in two periods of
major cultural and economic change: the early nineteenth and late twentieth
centuries. She skillfully unpacks public exposes and private confidences, in-
cluding today's blogs, chat rooms, and e-mails, to show how tastemakers and
consumers negotiated the look of American houses and home fashions, both
in the antebellum era and in our own time.
What Next
This book hopes to provide readers with a deeper understanding of how

economic institutions have historically helped to shape the world of fashion
around us. Far from the last word on the subject, it instead seeks to serve as
a springboard, as a source of inspiration for scholars wanting to know more.
If we are to understand how the fashion system works, scholars need to
build on the research presented here to examine fashion's relationship to
commercial enterprise, looking more closely at connections among firms,
individuals, ethnic groups, trade associations, and industries. For the United
States, for example, it is astounding that we know so little about New York's
history as a garment manufacturing hub and a fashion center, or about the
city's role in creating that distinctive American look: casual dressing. 21 Simi-
larly, our knowledge about how ideas about what has been stylish (or not)
circulated among individuals, companies, and industries is still limited. In
this book, Heather Hess shows how design reformers created a new Viennese
aesthetic that encompassed everything from apparel to home furnishings,
while Katalin Medvedev demonstrates how consumers living in a communist
regime borrowed images from Western popular culture to create their own
highly individualized dress styles. Elspeth H. Brown tells us how the Marl-
boro Man bubbled up from film and print culture to capture the imagination
of organizational men, who modified this masculine ideal to meet their firm's
needs-and their own vision of what was macho. As a whole, work like
this is wonderfully suggestive, pointing to fashion as an inclusive cultural
phenomenon with multidirectional flows. The observations of business-
woman Estelle Ellis, it seems, were remarkably insightful.
By looking at "dress codes" and "invented traditions," these essays turn

conventional ideas about fashion inside out in another way. Innovation, cre-
ativity, and constant change are only one side of fashion's Janus face. On the
other side are continuity, stability, and collective identity. Christine Ruane
shows how Peter the Great, anxious to augment his imperial image, required
European dress for his subjects, and how Russian fashion journalists re-
sponded by promoting a sartorial code that honored transcontinental unifor-
mity rather than individual expression. Looking at the other side of the globe,
Susan J. Matt demonstrates the enduring allure of the country cottage, which
for two centuries has appealed to Americans as the ideal embodiment of
"Home, Sweet Home." These cases, along with the work of Beaujot, Zdatny,
O'Connor, and others, show that the old and new persisted and coexisted in
the realm of style, fashion, and taste. Perhaps what engaged the wheels of
the fashion system, then, was not the incessant quest for novelty and the
concomitant media hype, but the dynamic interaction between change and
stasis, differentiation and uniformity, which could vary with time and place. 22
Finally, these essays suggest the tremendously rich territory awaiting
those who want to augment theory with in-depth empirical research. While
cultural theorists have speculated on the media's role in manipulating words
and images to stimulate excitement over changing fashions, contributors in
this book have taken another approach, stepping inside the offices of mass-
market magazines, advertising agencies, retail stores, trade associations, and
manufacturing firms to watch the agents of change and continuity at work.
Marlis Schweitzer's analysis of Edward Bok's editorial role at the Ladies'
Home Journal-the nation's largest women's magazine-and his vision for
an American aesthetic in dress, along with William R. Scott's essay on the
trade association for California menswear makers, use the lens of gender to
show how corporate actors labored to define and lay their stamp on feminin-
ity and masculinity. In these essays, we actually hear the voices of historical
actors, learn about their intentions in creating fashion, and see the final prod-
ucts. Bok's "American Fashions for American Women" were simultaneously
cutting-edge and conservative, while the creators of the California look fed
on Hollywood, the ultimate change machine, and helped popularize celebrity
culture among middle-class Americans who saw themselves as weekend war-
riors. Both scholars dig into personal and professional networks among busi-
nessmen, and scrutinize the politics of design and the process of cultural
production to show how the ideal American beauty and the postwar casual
male were imagined and replicated. 23 These stories, along with the essays by
Merlo and Polese, Pouillard, and Okawa, are remarkable for revealing the
vision and venerability of corporate actors, and for unpacking their motiva-
tions as the producers of fashion.
* * *
Fashion, like other forms of culture, is a great jigsaw puzzle. Digging through
the archives, historians retrieve pieces of the puzzle without knowing where
those parts actually fit. To date, cultural historians of fashion have collected
many of the pieces and assembled them to reveal a portrait of an elegant
couple attired in haute couture, poised to promenade through the luxurious
shops of the Champs Elysees, New Bond Street, or Fifth Avenue. Yet much
is missing from the picture: the people on the side streets, dressed in ready-
to-wear apparel or home-sewn clothes they believed were stylish; the distant
lofts where the clothing was designed; the garment factories where it was
made; the stores where it was sold; and the advertising executives, retail man-
agers, market researchers, design-school instructors, magazine editors, and
other ingenious entrepreneurs who worked behind the scenes to produce
fashion. As historians, we don't know what pieces of the fashion jigsaw puzzle
we will find next, or how the fully assembled picture will look. We can,
however, use the essays in this book to speculate on where the missing pieces
might be found and to direct our new inquiries in fruitful ways.
Before we begin the hunt, we might remember Estelle Ellis's deceptively
straightforward query-"What is fashion?"-and heed her call to think ex-
pansively about modes, manners, mores, and markets as we plan our research.
Only then might we find pieces that help to complete the jigsaw puzzle,
showing how fashion was produced through the interaction of commerce,
culture, and consumers.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Chapter Title: Rethinking Fashion

Book Title: Producing Fashion

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

Regina Lee Blaszczyk

"WHAT IS FASHION?" In November 1993, marketing consultant Estelle Ellis

material life, economic institutions, and other types of human interaction

Business History Meets the Fashion System

Ellis offered an amazingly open-minded view of fashion, one that challenged

On the Shoulders of Fashion-History Giants

University's 2005 exhibition, "A Perfect Fit," curators Gabriel M. Goldstein

Organizing the Fashion Trades

Inventing Fashions, Promoting Styles

Historians of fashion, advertising, and consumerism often use published pri-

consumer goods. Often these primary sources, created as propaganda, can

Shaping Bodies, Building Brands

Scholars acknowledge the importance of gender, sexuality, and bodies to the

efforts at a major American corporation. The novel applications were condi-

Customer Reactions, Consumer Adaptations

Audience response is a major theme in recent fashion and consumer histories.

thetics and subversion were weapons in the Hungarian consumers' battle

This book hopes to provide readers with a deeper understanding of how

By looking at "dress codes" and "invented traditions," these essays turn

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