BEFORE COSMOPOLITAN

Abstract

A new type of woman had emerged from the glossy pages of the new women's magazines; the “Girl”—or flapper girl—was young and fashionable, and often financially independent and thus constituted a valuable—and so far underestimated—market for modern consumer goods and fashion. Magazines like Die Dame or Das Blatt der Hausfrau shaped the definition of the Girl while at the same time providing the consumer with the necessary accessories of what constituted the Girl: fashion, arts, sports, and modern technology such as cars. Taking Siegfried Kracauer's essay on “The Mass Ornament” as its point of departure, this paper argues that the Girl emerges from the glossy surfaces of the magazine pages as an ornament without an attachment to an underlying community. The image is shaped through the consumption of the magazine while at the same time the female consumer shapes the fashioning of the image. It is here where the spheres of the public and the private are eventually negotiated as Jürgen Habermas has argued in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This process takes shape literally in the utilization of sewing patterns, which the magazines provide for the consumers. Ultimately, the question arises whether the Girl will be able to exercise new modes of life in the spaces of a new reality.