Cubist Fashion in the Newspapers

Abstract

ABSTRACT This feature reprints several early twentieth-century newspaper articles purporting to be accounts of cubist fashion shows. As well, it presents a short analysis of what those articles might mean. These articles reveal that the predominant reaction in the daily press to cubism was not so much vitriol as an arch skepticism, a skepticism which in these pieces was also a polemical analysis of cubism and fashion's dominant attributes. These writers turned to parody rather than just straightforward analysis, a move which allowed for a reduction of cubism and fashion into several impoverished ideas and an exaggerated display of how those ideas were embodied. For these writers, cubism's and fashion's arbitrary claims for significance were articulated through pretentious theoretical principles and assertions of group identities. Mistakenly dependent upon a motivating theory, cubism (and, by implication, fashion) was more mechanical than human; motivated by bogus utopian impulses, such as suffragism; and premised on a mistaken sense of its newness as development—rather than its newness as simple and arbitrary change.