THEAMERICAN LOOK

FASHION, SPORTSWEAR AND THEIMAGE OF WOMEN IN 1930s AND

1940s NEW YORK

REBECCA ARNOLD

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Copyright © 2009 Rebecca Arnold

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List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements xv

Introduction 1

CHAPTER ONE: New York and the Evolution of Sportswear 1929–39 13New York City 13Sportswear 23The Modern Sportswear Aesthetic I 30

CHAPTER TWO: American Body Culture 39Body Image/Body Culture 39Health and Hygiene 46Exercise and Dance 52Sports Body 61

CHAPTER THREE: Sportswear and the New York Fashion Industry During the Depression 75Effects of the Depression 75Career Women 83The Fashion Group 93

CHAPTER FOUR: Sportswear’s Promotion During the 1930s 105New York Department Stores 105The Fashion Media 116The Monastic Dress and Sportswear Promotion in the late 1930s 123

CHAPTER FIVE: Sportswear and the New York Fashion Industry During the Second World War 135Effects of the Second World War 135Sportswear Design and Representation 147The Modern Sportswear Aesthetic II 157

CHAPTER SIX: The American Look and the Rise of the Designer 169The American Look 169New York Sportswear Designers and Consumerism 178 The Woman of Fashion 1947 188

Conclusion 199

Bibliography 211

Index 231

CONTENTS

vii

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THE MODERN SPORTSWEAR AESTHETIC IIn November 1929, Vogue ran an article ‘The Revival of the Lady’, which exposed tensions

between traditional ideas of femininity and the emergence of a more forthright woman, who

embraced modern urban lifestyles. It began with the claim that the Lady had ‘nearly expired’,

and that, ‘the bustling life of the day, so hard on elegant fragility, had much to do with it. But

even more responsible was the new-found freedom of the Modern Woman, which had gone to

the head of that energetic person and made her push to the wall any one less aggressive’.44

Parisian couture is credited as an ‘ardent supporter of the practical Modern Woman’, although

that season designers had created delicate, draped garments to construct a woman who ‘has

elegance, which is expensive, making it, after the way of the world, more desirable to him who

pays … a pleasant contrast to the hectic hurry of the Modern Woman’.45 These conflicting visions

of womanhood – one subservient to men, the other independent – were to continue as

stereotypes of contemporary femininity throughout the 1930s. While the Modern Woman

seemed to epitomise the present and lead the way towards a more emancipated future, the

Lady’s allure lay in her aspirational charm and non-threatening alliance to the status quo.

Sportswear designers and promoters asserted the dominance of the Modern Woman, and

sought to construct her as the binary opposite of the Lady, who was represented as an elitist

anachronism, symbolised by Parisian couture, in contrast to the ideals of democracy and

freedom assigned to sportswear and, increasingly, to New York sportswear in particular.

Sportswear originated in Europe and the Modern Woman was as evident there as in the United

States. However, this seemed irrelevant to promoters, who were keen to ally both with ideas

of Americanness. This was already evident in the modernist aesthetic of contemporary

photography and cinema, as well as being fundamental to the way New York itself was

perceived at home and abroad. The development of a modern aesthetic in American fashion

photography can be seen as parallel to the development of a visual language to promote

American sportswear. It is significant that Martin Munkacsi’s famous photograph of a model

running along a beach from Harper’s Bazaar in December 1933 depicts sportswear (fig. 1.5).

Jean Moral had photographed a model walking through the city for Harper’s Bazaar a year

earlier, and Munkacsi developed this style to encapsulate a new direction within fashion

photography that drew upon documentary photography in its representation of a moment.46

Hungarian by birth, Munkacsi’s time in Berlin working for the Ullstein Press in the late 1920s

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NEW YORK AND THE EVOLUTION OF SPORTSWEAR 1929–39

1.5. Martin Munkacsi, B. Altman, Harper’s Bazaar, December 1933. © Joan Munkacsi. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

1.6. Jay Thorpe advertisement, Vogue, 1 January 1935

1.7. Dorothea Lange, Mother in California, 1937. FSA Collection, The Library of Congress

1.8. Sid Grossman, Coney Island, 1947–48. Photograph © Miriam Grossman Cohen. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

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had provided a template for his later work in America.47 He was inspired by ‘The New

Photography’, as practised by, for example, László Moholy-Nagy and Albert Renger-Patzsch,

who rejected the idea that photography should imitate art. Like them he instead embraced the

camera’s technology, and aimed to confront ‘the realities of urban life and the complex new

technologies that were both liberating and threatening’.48 According to Nancy White and John

Esten, Munkacsi’s ‘best fashion work shows the lessons of his Berlin period: effective close-ups,

oblique angles, strong patterns, bold diagonal elements, vertical framing, ideas derived from

progressive painting, and a sense of abstraction. To say nothing of spontaneity, style and

handling of movement’.49 These visual ideals were then applied to fashion photography, in

images that were often set outdoors, rather than in the studio’s artificial confines. While no less

time and preparation went into this kind of fashion image, the result broke free from traditional

fashion photographs that bore little relation to everyday life. They created a space within

magazines for glimpses of the real, albeit seen through the prism of photographers’ and fashion

editors’ idealisations of real lifestyles.

Carmel Snow, Harper’s Bazaar’s editor-in-chief from 1934 to 1957, wanted to revive the mag-

azine through the appropriation of a European modernist aesthetic. She employed Russian

exile Alexey Brodovitch to art direct and he developed a style that envisioned the magazine as

a whole, with bold graphics and modern photography to give the layout a dynamic rhythm. As

Andy Grundberg noted, it was ‘[Snow who] first saw that his [Munkacsi’s] ability to capture

action in a dynamic, spontaneous way could be used to express the new sense of American

fashion: one of movement, excitement and casual flair’. This was married to Brodovitch’s

‘increasingly spare but always dynamic layouts … [which] played a role in the transformation

of fashion from an essentially aristocratic enterprise devoted to clothes manufactured in Paris

into a more broad-based (if no less narcissistic and hierarchical) preoccupation with personal

and cultural “lifestyles”’.50 Harper’s Bazaar thus provided a more avant-garde fashion vision

than its more conservative rival Vogue, which, under the art direction of Dr. Agha, retained a

more sedate design aesthetic. Even in the pages of Vogue, though, this shift towards modern

photography was visible in both editorial and advertising imagery and, as with Harper’s Bazaar,

this came through most strongly in sportswear photographs, where clothing design and modern

representation fitted most smoothly together.

Munkacsi’s influence can be seen in figure 1.6, an advertisement for department store Jay

Thorpe’s sportswear from January 1935.51 Shot by Gray-O’Reilly at the Roney Plaza Sun Club’s

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beach, three photographs depict the same model running along the beach, cycling and

walking along the top of a breakwater. Her hair is tousled and windswept, she smiles at the

camera, and is clad in basic sportswear pieces. In one, she wears pale culottes and striped

top; in another, a ‘homespun linen’ playsuit comprised of wide-leg shorts and simple top with

contrast buttons. In the final image she wears a ‘three piece playsuit’, in the season’s

fashionable ensemble of monogrammed blouse with button-through skirt undone to reveal

matching shorts worn beneath. Her own ease of movement and lack of fussy styling is depicted

in conjunction with her natural surroundings: the beach is dotted with seaweed and the sea

swirls behind her.

Fashion photographs drew upon European modernism and the tenets of the photographers

involved with the Farm Security Association [F.S.A.] in America. The F.S.A. commissioned a

survey of living conditions across the country under the impact of the Depression. As

exemplified in figure 1.7, Dorothea Lange’s photograph of a young woman in California, the

survey’s stark aesthetic evoked people’s suffering as they shifted from state to state in search

of food and work. This connected to the documentary images of New York City produced by,

for example, Berenice Abbott and translated into fashion imagery by Louise Dahl-Wolfe and

Toni Frissell, who used the same stripped-down approach to foreground the figure in relation

to the American landscape, albeit to very different ends.

Jenny Livingston has identified the period from 1936 to 1963 as key to photo-journalism’s

formulation and names sixteen photographers, including Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt and Sid

Grossman, as central to its development. Small handheld cameras enabled the photographer

to move easily and use available light to capture fleeting, candid moments, in a similar way to

the F.S.A’s photographers.52 Under the tuition of well-known figures such as Alexey Brodovitch,

who taught at the New School for Social Research, and under the influence of photographers

Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, they wanted ‘to find a way of making photographs

that would express a quick and charged presentness, and by so doing to move beyond what

had already been done in their medium’.54 This desire to capture the moment was expressed

by Munkacsi’s comment that ‘all great photographs today are snapshots’.55 Sid Grossman’s

photographs of Coney Island of the late 1940s epitomise Munkacsi’s statement. Grossman

strove to capture an instant, and figure 1.8 shows someone in baggy trousers seemingly flying

through the air, caught mid-jump. The figure is photographed from below and looms over the

viewer. The body is turned into a dark, twisting abstract form against the sky.

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Edward Steichen pointed out an important difference between this kind of photo-journalism

and fashion photography:

One of the various advantages the technique of photography holds over the technique of

painting is the lens to record a given instant. In the production of a fashion photograph, the

given instant is not a normal happening – like the sunset, a landscape or a street scene –

which may be photographed as the result of sensitive observation and patient waiting. The

fashion photograph is more complex, as it is the picture of an instant made to order [on

the day of the sitting] … What may casually seem to be hectic chaos is, in reality, an

orderly, preconceived process of fitting the fashion material and the model to the picture.

Keen, knowing editorial eyes calmly dominate the work. When a given subject begins to

take shape, editorial eyes and camera eyes consult and coordinate the fashion idea with

the photographic idea.56

Steichen exposed the constructed nature of fashion imagery, even when its aesthetic is derived

from realist photography. Fashion magazines usually strove to maintain the seamless surface of

their pages, which presented the reader with a fantasy world of text and image for her to consume.

‘Realist’ fashion photography became a recurrent feature in fashion magazines during the 1930s

and 1940s. It was most often used to represent sportswear, which was closely allied to its outdoors

aesthetic and snapshot ideals.

Sportswear was already used to sell a number of seemingly unrelated products, since its positive

connotations added value to the brands involved. As Winifred D. Wandersee noted, advertising

had grown enormously in the 1920s. She cites the total dollar value of advertising in 1918 as

$1,468 million, a figure that rose to $3,426 million in 1929. The amount spent per capita on

newspaper and magazine advertisements was $5.03 in 1919, which grew to a peak of $9.22 in

1929, before it reduced to $7.01 in 1931 under the impact of the Depression.57 Despite the drop,

marketing levels remained significant, its growth, in Wandersee’s view:

A response to a number of developments, including a communication gap between pro-

ducers and consumers, the variety of new merchandise on the market, product differentiation,

the widening market through improved transportation, and increased recognition by

businessmen of the value of advertising as a means of building demand. Advertising increased

quantatively, but it also changed qualitatively, playing upon the emotions, fears, and anxieties

of Americans. That is, people’s social insecurities made them susceptible to manipulation by

advertisements that promised status and security through consumption.

THE AMERICAN LOOK

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Sportswear and its relationship to positive lifestyle values was one way in which advertisers

could play upon the public’s aspirational desires and fears.

Sportswear could therefore function in a number of ways within promotional material: to

reassure viewers with its coherent, ‘everyday’ image; contradictorily as a subconscious link to

the elite, leisured lifestyles from which it originated; to play upon viewers’ desire for particular

modern body ideals; and as a symbol of the active and educational values of sport itself and

was used in advertising for companies including Coca Cola.

America and sportswear were closely related to ideas of modernity. Each developed an image

that spoke of newness, progress and dynamism, while also representative of more ambiguous

qualities. As the Depression made the public more anxious, so their need for a cohesive national

identity to assuage the sense of imminent disaster grew, as did the New York fashion industry’s

need to project a coherent image that would encourage people to spend. This produced

conditions that were conducive to the formulation of the modern sportswear aesthetic. The

period’s restlessness was part of this aesthetic, just as it was part of New York’s identity.

Collective and individual identities were intertwined, and ‘presentness’ became the most ‘real’

expression of identity. In the modern city, ambiguities, triumphs and disasters were magnified.

If modernity, and sportswear as a clothing form closely allied to modernity’s forms, provided a

unifying vision of city and body, they could never completely erase the anxieties of the

Depression and war period and differences in wealth, status and ethnicity, for example, that

lurked beneath the surface. The modern sportswear aesthetic represented an idealised

collective vision of Americanness which drew upon New York City as a centre of fashion, as well

as of an emblem of modern design and the condition of modernity. This aesthetic also relied

upon contemporary cultural ideals of, for example, the body and health and hygiene to

construct its idealised vision. These discourses were equally important to the formation of

American national identity and to the image of sportswear that New York City’s fashion industry

constructed.

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1 William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 18.

2 Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, in The Practice of Everyday Living (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 94.

3 Certeau, ‘Walking in the City’, 95.

4 James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), 14.

5 Donald, Imagining the Modern City, 14.

6 Princess Marthe Bibesco, ‘ The Aura of New York’, Vogue 1 January 1935, 40.

7 Quoted in Kathleen Howard, No title, Harper’s Bazaar, February 1930, 51.

8 Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham, xvi.

9 Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham, 35.

10 Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham, 36.

11 Bibesco, The Aura of New York, 88.

12 Bibesco, The Aura of New York, 40.

13 Sophie Watson, ‘City A/genders’, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds., The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 290.

14 William R.Taylor, ‘The Launching of a Commercial Culture: New York City, 1860–1930’, in John Hull Mollenkopf, ed., Power, Culture and Place: Essays on New York City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), 112.

15 Edna Woolman Chase, ‘Vogue’s Eye View of the Mode, Zoning New York for the Shopper’, Vogue, 27 April 1929, 57.

16 Chase, ‘Vogue’s Eye View of the Mode’, 57.

17 ‘Little Shops Above the Fifties’, Vogue, 30 March 1929, 73.

18 Lois Gould, Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 82.

19 Jeanette A . Jarrow and Beatrice Judelle, Inside the Fashion Business: Text and Readings (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 112.

20 Daves, The Ready-made Miracle, 43.

21 Daves, The Ready-made Miracle, 44.

22 Edna Slocum, ‘Writing Fashions For Trade Papers’, in Stevenson, How the Fashion World Works, 155.

23 Nell Snead, ‘Newspaper Fashion Reporting and Editing’, in Stevenson, How the Fashion World Works, 158.

24 Nancy L.Green, ‘Sweatshop Migrations: The Garment Industry Between Home and Shop’, in David Ward and Olivier Zunz, eds., The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900–40 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992), 215.

25 Green, ‘Sweatshop Migrations’, in Ward and Zunz, The Landscape of Modernity, 215–16.

26 Marjorie Thompson, ‘New Ideas from the Paris Openings’, in Harper’s Bazar, April 1926, 92. (The magazine’s title did not change to Harper’s Bazaar until October 1929).

27 Advertisement caption for United States Rubber Company, Vogue, 1 May 1933, 11.

28 Paris takes to Jersey for Town and Sports’, Vogue, 1 February 1932, 39.

29 Advertisement caption for Philip Mangone, Vogue, 15 July 1934, 2.

30 Advertisement caption for Abercrombie and Fitch, Vogue, 16 March 1929, 15.

31 Advertisement caption for Abercrombie and Fitch, 15.

32 Elizabeth D. Adams, ‘How to Look For and Use Fashion Sources’, in Stevenson, ed., How the Fashion World Works, 2.

33 Adams, ‘How to Look For and Use Fashion Sources’, in Stevenson, ed., How the Fashion World Works, 2.

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34 Advertisement caption for Franklin Simon’s Ann Lawren Selections. This advertisement is also notable since it states that the clothes are ‘Tailored by Townley’, an early advertisement for the firm Claire McCardell designed for, although her name is not given. Vogue, 15 December 1936, 7.

35 Martha Wolfenstein, ‘The Emergence of Fun Morality’, in Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn, eds., Mass Leisure(Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960, originally published in 1958), 86.

36 Wolfenstein, ‘The Emergence of Fun Morality’, in Larrabee and Meyersohn, Mass Leisure, 92.

37 Robert Littell, ‘We Want Uniforms’, Vogue, 1 January 1937, 47.

38 Littell, ‘We Want Uniforms’, 47.

39 ‘Pyjamas – When are they Worn?’ Vogue, 1 June 1931, 71.

40 ‘Shop Hound’, Vogue, 15 February 1933, 68.

41 Advertisement caption for Mrs Franklin Inc., Vogue, 15 March 1932, 93.

42 ‘The Chic Suburbanite Goes to Town’, Vogue, 7 December 1929, 106.

43 Louis H. Masotti and Jeffrey K. Hadden draw upon the United States Bureau of the Census figures to plot the steady growth of the suburbs. They state that population distribution rose as follows: in 1920, 28.9 per cent lived in central cities and 14.8 per cent in the suburbs; in 1930, 31 per cent in the central cities and 18 per cent in the suburbs; in 1940, 31.6 per cent in the central cities and 19.5 per cent in the suburbs and in 1950, 32.3 per cent in the central cities and 23.8 per cent in the suburbs. Louis H. Masotti and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., ‘Introduction’, in Suburbia in Transition (New York: A New York Times Book,1974), 7.

44 ‘The Revival of the Lady’, Vogue, 9 November 1929, 97.

45 ‘The Revival of the Lady’, 97.

46 See Martin Harrison, Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 10.

47 Nancy White and John Esten, Style in Motion: Munkacsi Photographs ‘20s, ‘30s’,40s (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1979), n. p.

48 White and Esten, Style in Motion, n.p.

49 White and Esten, Style in Motion, n.p.

50 Andy Grundberg, Brodovitch: Masters of American Design, Documents of American Design (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 66.

51 Grundberg, Brodovitch, 19.

52 Jenny Livingston, The New York School, Photographs 1936–63 (New York: Stewart Tabori and Chang, 1992), 259.

53 Livingston, The New York School, 260.

54 Martin Munkacsi quoted in ‘Think While You Shoot’, Harper’s Bazaar November 1935, 92, in White and Esten, Style In Motion, n. p.

55 Edward Steichen quoted in ‘A Fashion Photograph’, Vogue, 12 October 1929, 99.

56 Winifred D. Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 16.

57 Wandersee, Women’s Work, 16.

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