Film, Fashion & Consumption - Fashioning Girlhood across the Media in the Mid–Twentieth Century, Apr 2023

This article looks at the influence of Hollywood stardom on Bombay films in the 1960s that gave birth to Indian female star figures: the influence of Audrey Hepburn and the political events in India had major roles to play. Stars, such as Sadhana Shivdasani, Sharmila Tagore and Mumtaz, occupy an important role in the advent of economic and sexual liberalization that became central to feminist (re)presentations. They also played a key role in creating the image of the ‘ideal’ Indian woman. Despite its many patriarchal-centred narrations, Bombay cinema occupied a prominent place in feminist engagement as it created more opportunities for dialogues and awareness for women than were generally available at the time in Indian culture.

The hugely popular girls’ magazine Jackie (1964–93) was a significant source of guidance for its readers on a range of matters, including fashion. This article analyses archive editions of Jackie held in the Femorabilia collection at Liverpool John Moores University to re-examine its fashion content during a period marked by a shift in emphasis from creativity to consumption. It also revisits Angela McRobbie’s highly influential research on Jackie, arguing that Jackie’s fashion coverage fulfils a broader social role than simply supporting the ‘ideology of femininity’ that McRobbie’s contemporaneous work identifies as central to the magazine. Examining issues from 1973 to 1974 illuminates a period which is more nuanced than is often suggested, and which is marked by both continuity and also substantial change. Jackie’s depiction of early 1970s girlhood shows the necessity of negotiating public space for teenage girls. Its fashion content represents the balance of moderation, experimentation and adaptability offered by the Jackie reader’s self-presentation. Findings demonstrate the heterogeneous meanings on offer in the magazine: while Jackie readers are urged to show restraint in engaging with fashion, they are also encouraged to explore the wider world, dressed and ready for it.

This article investigates how Bollywood cinema represented girlhood experiences in India in the early 1970s. It argues that the films during this time focused on representing girls who displayed a variety of new fashion styles and attitudes, some of which were borrowed from western cultures. This was a sign that there was a new way of representing girls which broke with the submissive, dull and melancholic sari-wearing Indian female stereotype entrapped within domestic settings. The immediate result of this was the emergence of new style leaders and popular icons in Indian popular cinema. This study uses Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Guy Mankowski’s idea of self-design to examine how Indian girlhood was renegotiated in the 1970s as an individual-centric idea with more agency and power. Here, self-fashioning refers to the way girls adopt new elements of fashion, styles and attitudes to distinguish their identity from earlier archetypal modes of representation in film and culture. It specifically analyses the emergence of Jaya Bhaduri in Guddi (1971) and Dimple Kapadia in Bobby (1973) as case studies to understand the transformation of girlhood representations in early 1970s Bollywood that opened a new space for girls to redefine their selfhood through the assimilation of consumerism, western culture and fashion styles.

The article investigates the legacy, in terms of narratives and representations of femininity, of Vogue Italia covers from the 1960s and 1970s on contemporary Italian young women. To do this, we visually and textually analyse two different corpora: 143 Vogue Italia covers, retrieved from the Vogue Italia Archive and published between 1964 (Vogue’s first publication in Italy) and 1974 and between 2020 and 2022; and 46 mock covers of fashion simulated magazines created by female undergraduate fashion students during the academic years 2020/2021 and 2021/2022. Through the first corpus we examine the hegemonic discourse of Vogue Italia, assuming that it expresses the typical Italian way of creating and expressing female fashion while reflecting the shifting ideologies of the Italian feminist movement over the last century; the second corpus reveals the imaginations and narratives of young girls on fashion, disclosing how women’s – and girls’ – identities have been shaped over time and how the standards for femininity, beauty, happiness and health have been transferred and reworked from one generation to the next. In our study the parallel investigation between the longitudinal analysis of the visual apparatus Vogue Italia and the covers produced by students shows, first, elements of continuity and similarity in the communicative and instrumental use of fashion, according to the practice of remixing. Second, it demonstrates that students assimilated successfully the narrative codes typical of traditional fashion communication media but they reinterpret the imagery and representations disseminated, thus bringing into the public discourse issues such as sustainability, gender, diversity, body positivity and stereotypes. Therefore, the study also reveals that girls have always been more than simple passive consumers of fashion magazines and cultural products.