Représentations féminines et stéréotypes dans la presse de mode américaine : le tournant des années 1970

Abstract

In 1975, Trevor Millum, foreseeing academic, feminist, and later general public criticism, stated that magazines only presented four stereotyped roles to their readers : “hostess”, “mannequin”, “self-involved narcissist”, and “wife-and-mother” ; and that through their repetition, magazines preserved and spread the status quo of previous decades, even though from the beginning of the 1960s, fashion magazines, whose content and forms shifted, presented themselves as advocates of women's empowerment. In light of Millum's assessment, I will argue that the 1970s represent a turning point for such magazines, their aesthetics and discourses producing women stereotypes. This paper studies their emergence and their evolution over the course of the decade, through observation of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and through the examination of an already sizable literature on the models they produce, in order to bring out the major trends of the time.