When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture Elizabeth M. Sheehan Marlis Schweitzer. When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 320, illustrated. $39.95 (Hb). In When Broadway Was the Runway, Marlis Schweitzer sheds light on the multifaceted but little studied relationship between the fashion industry and commercial Broadway theatre from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In this lucid and detailed cultural history, Schweitzer uncovers connections and collaborations among theatre managers, department store owners, fashion designers, critics, advertisers, actors, and consumers. She establishes that the feminized phenomenon of fashion was a driving force in the development and reception of Broadway theatres as they became “fully commercialized urban spaces” (4). In turn, through her focus on fashion, Schweitzer demonstrates Broadway’s role in the development of modern consumer culture and in the formation of concepts and practices of labour, celebrity, beauty, subjectivity, and (especially) gender in America. When Broadway Was the Runway builds upon a substantial body of scholarship on the gendering of modern consumer culture in relation to the development of the department store, as well as work by scholars, such as Susan Glenn, Joel Kaplan, and Sheila Stowell, that examines how theatre shaped ideas and practices of femininity in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and America. Schweitzer’s first chapter focuses on two key shifts in the late nineteenth century that enabled and encouraged collaborations between legitimate theatre and the fashion industry: the centralization of theatrical bookings and the growth of a female audience. Schweitzer shows that the same anxieties that shaped perceptions of department stores, anxieties about women’s economic power and about the culture of spectacle and consumption, also informed debates about the state of American theatre. Critics, and even actors, complained that the purported decline in the quality of the theatre was attributable to the “illiterate, candy-eating” women and “matinee girls” who attended plays merely to see actresses wear cutting-edge fashions (34). In fact, as Schweitzer contends, the stage emerged as a key source of sartorial knowledge for upper- and working-class women as they sought to fashion themselves as modern subjects. [End Page 423] In her second chapter, Schweitzer examines collaborations between theatres and department stores in the late nineteenth century. She argues that [a]s the most dominant, widespread entertainment form in the United States, with a demographic and geographic reach much greater than that of the individual department store, the legitimate theater and vaudeville, its popular counterpart, were well positioned to shape modern American consumer culture, especially tastes in fashion. (51) Moreover, she asserts that theatres’ efforts to attract consumers through displays of fashion worked to “naturalize the relationship between female spectatorship and consumption” and thus participated in “the production of the modern female consumer” (50, 53). At the same time, stages and, more specifically, actresses’ bodies became places where department stores and manufacturers could introduce brand-name goods, a phenomenon that dovetailed with the rise of realist dramas, which required costumes that audiences would believe might be found in contemporary drawing rooms and streets. Ties between theatres and the fashion industry hinged on the disciplining and commodification of actresses’ bodies, and Schweitzer draws on recent scholarship by Faye Dudden and Glenn (among others) to describe these phenomena. Discussing influential actresses, including Irene Castle, Sophie Tucker, and Aida Overton Walker, Schweitzer’s third and fourth chapters explain Broadway’s role in narrowing standards of beauty and tying consumption to social status. Yet When Broadway Was the Runway also follows Glenn’s work (as well as scholarship on theatre and the suffrage movement) by emphasizing how actresses’ engagements with fashion could work to expose the performativity of race, gender, and ethnicity or to enact controversial forms of female pleasure, desire, or self-expression. For example, Schweitzer maintains that actresses’ roles in choosing their own costumes “positioned women as artistic creators, producers of meaning, and interpreters of their own psyches” and, therefore, “encouraged women to engage in productive acts of imagination” (177). This dialectic between the possibilities and constraints for women in fashion and those for women in theatre animates the final chapter’s analysis...