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Book Review
Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. By Diana Crane. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. x, 294 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-226-11798-7.)
A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of
America. By Jenna Weissman Joselit. (New York: Metropolitan, 2001.
257 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-8050-5488-X.)
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It seems surprising that historians have not paid more attention to the fashion world. Material culture is now an acceptable tool for historical analysis, but the material of the fashion world is usually given only token attention. Diana Crane's Fashion and Its Social Agendas and Jenna Weissman Joselit's A Perfect Fit are, however, welcome corrections to this oversight. |
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These two books are for different audiences and achieve different ends. Joselit's A Perfect Fit is written for a large market. Her style is breezy and anecdotal, with an emphasis on middle-class fashion and popular culture. In contrast, Crane's study, Fashion and Its Social Agendas, is a thoroughly scholarly treatment, exploring both working-class and high-style fashion. |
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Joselit's A Perfect Fit is a delight. The author's wit, verve, and excellent writing make this book a joy to read. A Perfect Fit records the vagaries and sometimes nonsensical aspects of fashion pitted against the moralistic and pious spokesmen for propriety. Yet fashion often mirrored serious dialogues within society itself. Consider this offhand statement: |
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Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Ruth D. Howland sued her husband for divorce on the grounds that he forced her to wear long skirts. . . . "Was that cruelty?" queried the presiding judge. "It was to me," she replied.
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Amusing? Yes. But, on reflection, Joselit is reflecting on power issues our society still deals with today. |
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In addition, Joselit brings in many voices not always heard in the fashion debates. Most refreshing is the emphasis on Jewish culture (the author, an American studies scholar, is well known for her books on Jewish American society). We hear of the immigrants who shed the old-country kerchief for the fashionable flowered hat, a symbol of America's possibilities. Even the fur coat, suspect today, was "the achievement of a decade of yearning" to Jewish immigrant women. Included is a discussion of the theories of "the curmudgeonly sociologist Thorstein Veblen" and the question of Jewish Americanness and taste (act "more like violets and less like sunflowers"). |
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A Perfect Fit includes the experience of men and of African Americans as well. There are several interesting photographs of fashionable black women in fur coats and fine hats. On gender, Joselit notes that, "where variations in women's attire yielded an altered ideal of womanliness, variations in menswear had no such effect on the corresponding ideal of gentlemanliness." Once again, Joselit has highlighted current historiography amid the bits and pieces of fashion lore. The conclusion analyzes our modern era, where clothes no longer carry moral judgments. She ends this book: "Once tethered to the body politic, clothing now celebrates the self." |
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Crane's Fashion and Its Social Agendas addresses the same theme, the move from nineteenth-century single-"class" style to twentieth-century "consumer" and "fragmented" fashion, from the body politic to the celebrated postmodern self. But there the comparison ends. Crane's study is so richly argued, so subtly analyzed, and so impressively documented that one would have thought she lived in the fashion world. Yet Crane, a sociologist, has also written an important book on the art world and studies on the scientific community and on physicians' care. Such eclecticism only enhances her probing weapons. |
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