Movement and Modernity: New York Sportswear, Dance, and Exercise in the 1930s and 1940s

The Style Stakes: Fashion, Sportswear and Horse Racing in Inter-war America

“…Movement, mobility and gesture were used in photographs to create and capture a sense of the 'American Look', one representing a forward-thrusting, vital, nation. 81 Yet again, the dichotomy between American and French fashion sensibilities, as discussed above, surfaces here. America's 'honest' and 'energetic' style of natural snapshot might be viewed as the antithesis to the restrained and carefully posed approach associated with its Parisian equivalent.…”

“The American Look”

“…13 Visuality of the American modern woman was apparent in the modernist aesthetic of 1930s fashion photography, magazines, and popular films. Popular visual culture in the forms of photography, cinema, and fashion magazines encouraged women to train their bodies through dance and exercise (Arnold 2008). As early as the 16 February 1929 issue of Vogue,…”

“…For more on cultural memory, see Nora (1989), Halbwachs ([1950Halbwachs ([ ] 1980Halbwachs ([ , 1992, Huyssen (1995), Sturken (1997), Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer (1999). 2 For more on The American Look see Talmey (1946), Leach (1993), Webber-Hanchett (2003), Arnold (2009). The phrase was developed in the 1930s by marketing executive Dorothy Shaver (Talmey 1946;Leach 1993;Yohannan and Nolf 1999;Breward 2003;Webber-Hanchett 2003) at the upscale department store Lord & Taylor to promote the American fashion industry through encouraging middle-class American women to see themselves in the styles.…”

“…dress (Figure 8.1) encapsulating the style. 4 Previous ethnographic analysis of the shift dress' cultural significance in American middle-class suburban culture (Kealy-Morris 2018) is extended into a broader analysis of the style within America's cultural memory as a signifier of female youthful fitness and the cultural expectations of the female body (Arnold 2009).…”

The Feminine Awkward: Graceless Bodies and the Performance of Femininity in Fashion Photographs

“…The management of the body took on a new dimension as women's magazines began to feature diet and exercise advice along with tips on how to achieve the ideal body shape. (see Arnold 2008) As new ways of walking and posing entered the vocabulary of fashion modelling, static studio poses gave way to images of models running and jumping, capering on the beach in the summer and laughing on the ski slopes in the winter. But this exuberance was always carefully contained: the taut bodies and tanned limbs on display in these images were governed, in many important respects, by the same formal constraints seen inof earlier studio work of photographers such as Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Heune, and Edward Steichen.…”