A Perfect Fit
Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A striking and inventive social history of the role of clothing in the making of modern Americans.
While fashions of the rich and famous have been lushly chronicled, little attention has been paid to the meaning of clothes for everyone else. Yet between 1890 and the outbreak of World War II, as ready-to-wear came into its own, the clothes of ordinary Americans claimed the nation's attention. Allied with civic virtue, fashion now played an increasingly important role in shaping the national character.
Drawing on a wealth of sources -- from advertisements, trade journals, and health manuals to sermons, science, and songs -- acclaimed historian Jenna Weissman Joselit shows how the length of a woman's skirt, the shape of a man's hat, and the height of a pair of heels enabled Americans of every faith, color, and class to feel part of the modern nation. As moral arbiters warned that extravagant attire might undermine equality, and gentlemen worried that wearing colored shirts reared them less manly, the newly arrived and newly emancipated -- immigrants and African-Americans -- wondered just how much jewelry was appropriate to their new status as citizens. Engaging, imaginative, and original, A Perfect Fit uncovers a time in American history when getting dressed was more about fitting in than standing out and vividly shows how clothes expressed the spirit of democracy and the promise of America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the 1890s to the 1930s, social historian Joselit (The Wonders of America) argues in this enticingly illustrated volume, fashion was "the most literal expression of who we were as a nation." In an increasingly diverse society, fashion was billed as a unifying force, she argues; its arbiters promised that anyone, from Jewish ghetto girls to ex-slaves, could blend in by wearing the right clothes. To make her case, Joselit quotes from the Ladies' Home Journal, Vogue and other magazines, on everything from women's hemlines to men's suits, shoes to hats, furs to jewelry. Though she also quotes rabbis, popes and advice columnists, as well as merchants like Henri Bendel, she doesn't include many working girls or sales figures from Sears or Woolworth's. More research is needed to prove that ordinary Americans believed fashion's promises. Still, Joselit's book is enjoyable a fluffy history lite, with a liberal smattering of turn-of-the-century advertisements for corsets and collars. Joselit is stronger as a museum curator than a historian, yielding a book that's far more stimulating visually than intellectually. Indeed, there's nothing new here the "democratization of style" has been well documented by other fashion historians for years. Readers interested in this particular subject would be better served by Claudia Kidwell's works, or even Kennedy Frazier's. Illus.
