Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017

Dieting as a fashionable undertaking in the public sphere appears throughout the course of the long eighteenth century. It was part of a shift in awareness to the public stigma of obesity, and marks the rise of a dieting culture focused on psychological effects rather than purely somatic phenomena. It is coterminous with the redefinition of the ‘reasonable’ (rational) person both in law as well as in the public sphere: ‘reasonableness’ comes to define the normal within the cult of the rational; obesity comes to mark that state beyond reasonableness. Such views led and continue to lead to a potential for psychological difficulties, which have come to be the hallmark of modern dieting practice.

Although hair has long maintained a presence in cultural, sociological, and anthropological scholarship, little attention has been paid to how the subject of hair functioned in the medium of advertisements. My research enters this conversation to uniquely suggest that we can learn about mid-century American values and ideal domesticity from shampoo advertisements during a redefining cultural moment in American history. Specifically, in this paper I explore how shampoo advertisements inserted white women’s hair in a late- and post-World War II conceptualization of ideal domesticity. Rather than merely advertising mid-century hygiene products, I argue that shampoo ads characterized a racialized standard of beauty that naturalized whiteness in the representation of ideal late- and post-war domesticity. Using two prevalent brands as case studies, I situate this analysis between the years 1944 and 1952, a time period I refer to as the Shampoo Revolution. Concurrent with this period during which America transitioned from a wartime to postwar economy was the rapid expansion of the shampoo industry which had profound consequences on popular discourse, elevating a narrow representation of hair as a requisite component of American domesticity. I provide an analysis of this conceptualization of domesticity, and the emerging hair culture that was by the mid-1940s, a prominent aspect of popular media and beauty industry interests. Additionally, I discuss conventions in advertising shampoo, and identify specific themes in Drene and Lustre-Crème ads that represent a particular mid-century domestic ideal.

In the last few years, many luxury fashion labels have ventured into the hospitality industry. Italian houses have been particularly active in capitalizing on their brand value by employing brand extension to create branded hotels where customers can experience a lifestyle that reflects the spirit of the label. After a phase of rapid expansion, however, this phenomenon appears to have slowed down. Taking the case of Maison Moschino, the first foray of fashion brand Moschino into the hospitality industry, this article explores the rationale for such brand extensions. In light of the failure of that venture, the opportunities and the risks involved in brand extension are examined.

The DOBAG project refers to an experiment designed to regenerate traditional craft making in indigenous cultures. Its focus were rural villages in Western Turkey and it emerged at a historical moment when the idea had currency. The project was inspired by a German scientist who lived and researched in Turkey. Having discovered the recipes for reproducing the ancient textile dyes that were extracted from plants, he spent time teaching them to the women artisans. In an example of entrepreneurial initiative, he also set up cooperatives to organize the work so as to put the women back in control of production after years of industrial weaving using synthetic dyes, and weaving to pre-ordered templates. His business model regulated retail by cutting out the middle men and working directly with select international dealers. The project was seen as an achievement of heritage preservation by the founders and by researchers, and for several decades starting in the early 1980s and ending after 2010, it helped households in remote villages in rural Anatolia, home to former nomads, to improve their standard of living. However, changes in Turkish economy and global markets, lack of infrastructure to support the new way of life, and different family priorities facilitated a shift among villagers from heritage-based entrepreneurship to becoming urban wage labourers. The project embodied Western colonialist guilt, the fantasy of saving the ‘noble savage’, and the tourist imagination in search of authenticity. The villagers, however, appeared more concerned with making a living, and heritage did not feature highly in their concerns. They treated the ‘staged authenticity’ demanded by the project as a sort of marketing tool. The comparison between the inside perspective of the weavers, and the outsiders, provided a starting point for problematizing the meaning and the usefulness of tradition in crafting identities through national costumes or national carpets. Some of the researchers who studied the DOBAG project rejected a binary approach in favour of a more nuanced view with less well defined categories. One such example, the notion of ‘thresholds’, was found both in the field work of anthropologists and in the art of Fatma Shanan, whose recent exhibition deals with issues of thresholds (e.g. between genders, interior/exterior, pure/contaminated, compliant/subversive, tradition/modernity), and portrays women negotiating the invisible boundaries of tribal community in the process of modernisation, which is a part of a modern state.

From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies, Jennifer Le Zotte (2017, first edition) Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 336 pp., ISBN: 9781469631905, Paperback, $27.95

Travel and fashion

Travel might not immediately invoke fashion associations, but a new book and exhibition reveal that they are intimately connected.

Part 1: Exhibition

Volez, Voguez, Voyagez – Louis Vuitton, Grand Palais, Paris, 4 December 2015–21 February 2016