American Look Research Articles

‘The American Look’: The transformation of women’s sportswear in 1930s and 1940s America

This article will suggest that the American sportswear style reflects the unique historical and cultural influences on American dress from the birth of the new democratic nation in the eighteenth century to the dominance of New York City’s ready-to-wear industry in the 1950s. Focusing on the key decades of the 1930s and 1940s, this article will explore the marketing campaign of Dorothy Shaver, vice-president of the luxury retailer Lord & Taylor, who in 1932 coined the phrase ‘the American Look’ to promote American fashion designers’ collections. The legacy of sportswear designer Claire McCardell, arguably the best known of the New York-based ready-to-wear designers will be examined. McCardell’s combination of nostalgic American prairie style with the use of everyday workwear fabrics of cotton plaid, denim, wool and jersey created an unpretentious casual American style based on comfort, ease and flexibility, which is reflected today in the contemporary American ready-to-wear market. The article will maintain that the promotion of the American Look via photographic shoots, magazines, advertisements, visual merchandising, exhibition and film influenced the style and taste of dress that the female American body ought to ‘fit into’. This style, it will be argued, encouraged the development of a cultural memory of American dress by establishing a material link between national identity and clothing.

Showtime for American Business: General Motors and American Look (1958)

The Chevrolet-General Motors–sponsored film American Look (1958) harnessed technologies of Hollywood spectacle to make their production bigger and bolder than many previous sponsored films. Beyond merely selling a car, the film engaged its viewers with an exhibition of General Motors' corporate persona, aligning its products with the prestige of good design on a grand scale in a Technicolor, widescreen, sponsored epic. Locating my analysis within the cultural and geopolitical context of the Cold War era, this paper argues that American Look expands current rubrics for understanding sponsored and industrial films.

Sally Milgrim

A handful of American designers on the American fashion scene in the 1920s and early 1930s devoted their careers to establishing an authentic American look despite the predominance of Paris fashion. Sally Milgrim, a successful and influential businesswoman who preceded her American and European counterparts in remarkable ways, was one of those designers. She introduced individuality, comfort, practicality, and versatility through her designs for American women. This paper is the first complete study to identify Sally Milgrim’s contributions and aims to recognize an important, but forgotten, person in American fashion.

The fashion gap: the Cold War politics of American and Soviet fashion, 1945-1959

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the role that fashion played in the Cold War competition between the USA and the Soviet Union during the period from 1945 to 1959.Design/methodology/approach– This paper begins by situating fashion within the larger American efforts of cultural diplomacy. It then examines the American and Soviet approaches to fashion. Finally, it focuses on the fashion show at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. This paper utilizes primary sources, including archival sources and period newspapers and magazines.Findings– Both American and Soviet leaders tried to use fashion to embody the ideological values of each political and economic system. Both also acknowledged a “fashion gap”, whereby Americans enjoyed clear superiority thanks to a well-developed mass production system of ready-made, stylish clothing, that some termed the American Look. Americans hoped the fashion gap would demonstrate that only capitalism could provide women with an abundance of the necessary – but also desirable – consumer goods that enhanced their feminine beauty. Thus, fashion played an important part in the Cold War cultural struggle, in which American and Soviet women were key participants.Originality/value– Much has been written about the Cold War cultural diplomacy, especially the Moscow exhibition, but fashion is often left out of the analyses. Meanwhile, both the American Look and Soviet efforts to create socialist fashion have been examined, but no work has been done to look at the two together to understand fashion’s larger implications for the Cold War.

Fashioning and selling the American Look: Dorothy Shaver and modern art

This article analyzes the pioneering efforts of Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor department store in New York to promote American design and designers from the 1920s to the 1950s. With archival and periodical evidence, this article first situates her within a longer tradition of American fashion nationalism. It then argues that Shaver succeeded when others before her failed because she embraced the rising tide of modernism. This article examines her three major marketing promotions: modern decorative art in 1928, American designers in 1932, and finally, a cohesive “American Look” in 1945. No previous study has linked the three together to identify the common thread of modernism behind her long, well-known campaign for American design. With her success, Shaver built reputations for herself and her store as leaders in promoting American fashion, and in 1945, she ascended the last rung of the store's corporate ladder to the presidency.

Stormwater management: can we learn from others?

While there is considerable amount of literature examining how and why American federal and state governments look for information and ideas, there is considerably less knowledge of how these processes operate at the local level. This is particularly true in the case of how ideas related to sustainable water management policies are found and used by local governments. This article attempts to open this area by examining where, how and to what purpose local agents engage in the transfer of low-impact development policies and techniques. This article is organised around four questions: (1) Is there a basic agreement about the pioneers in stormwater management; (2) Where did agents gather information; (3) Did this involve complex understanding; and (4) What emerged as key obstacles to the transfer and learning processes amongst the local authorities involved in this study?

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom'sJustice and the American Metropolisconcisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does Americanpolitical sciencelook when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom'sJustice and the American Metropolisconcisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does Americanpolitical sciencelook when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom'sJustice and the American Metropolisconcisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does Americanpolitical sciencelook when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

1980년 이후 에스닉 패션에 관한 연구 -1980년부터 2009년까지의 Vogue지 내용분석을 중심으로-

This study investigates and compares the changes in ethnic fashion presented over a 30-year period to understand the diversity of ethnic trends according to historical trends. Data were collected from 59 volumes of Vogue magazine for January and July in each year from 1980 to 2009. The data used for content analysis consists of 407 words and these were condensed into three periods according to the decade (1980-1989, 1990-1999, and 2000-2009). The selected words were classified into five sub-themes according to previous research definitions such as Asian look, European look, American look, African look, and Oceanic look. The results are as follows. First, ethnic fashion was highly presented in the 1990s and 1980s, and decreased in the 2000s; of note is that the Asian look appeared more in the 1990s. Second, ethnic fashion showed a higher frequency of F/W seasons in the 1980s and S/S seasons in the 2000s, while both seasons had a higher frequency in the 1990s. The sub-themes of coexistence were presented 26seasons out of 59 seasons. The coexistence of the Asian-European look was evident in the 1980s and 2000s, while the sub-themes coexistence was more diverse in the 1990s. Third, the words selected from sub-themes of ethnic fashion demonstrated the differences by decade. In particular, various fabrics and patterns appeared in the 1990s.

Modern Fashions for Modern Women: The Evolution of New York Sportswear in the 1930s

This article aims to establish the significance and diversity of sportswear styles designed and manufactured in New York during the 1930s. It will assert that the 1930s was a crucial period in New York sportswear's evolution. This decade tends to be overlooked by fashion historians, who either make generalisations about American fashion in the 1930s or focus on developments in the 1940s. This article will demonstrate that the Depression era was central to sportswear's emergence as a key form of affordable, mass-produced clothing, which comprised simple, interchangeable garments that could be worn in a variety of settings. This article will establish the importance of the 1930s as a period when New York sportswear was crystallised as a design and marketing ideal. This was due to both the economic pressures of the 1930s, which made cheaper mass-produced clothing more appealing, and to shifts within the fashion industry, which saw more co-ordinated attempts to promote indigenous design. Sportswear will be discussed in terms of three key categories: active sportswear, town and country wear and resort wear. Surviving dress from American and British collections will be analysed to demonstrate the importance of these categories, and the ways in which they came to form an ideal of Americanness through their design aesthetic, as well as the way they were advertised. Garments by manufacturers such as Davidow, and designers such as Clare Potter, will be contrasted with examples from London and Paris to show how New York was gradually to evolve its own distinct styles, which would in the following decade be characterised by the term the 'American Look'. The clean lines and machine aesthetic of this style were mythologised as an expression of American national identity — as practical, rational and authentic. As the 1930s wore on, New York sportswear was increasingly linked to modern lifestyles, and thus was portrayed as ideal for women who were active, whether as college girls, housewives, career women, or through travel. The notion of femininity that it evoked linked to white, middle-class ideals, and existing assumptions about American fashion's 'democratic' approach that eschewed the élitism of European fashion therefore need to be questioned.

Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History

If I were a gambling woman, I would start a betting pool: When the 1989 guide to monographs in my field, Books about Early America: 2001 Titles, is brought up to date, how many titles will it have to include? Take a guess. Would 5,001 be too low an estimate? If the hard copy became an electronic guide that was regularly updated, might the number soar to 10,001? While it might be fun to run the pool, the final number of titles would probably give me pause.1 No other field in American history has grown as fast, mostly because colonial history now overlaps with and borrows from so many other fields. It has long taken from and contributed to many other fields of history, but the scope and rate of expansion have increased dramatically. The border crossings now include those between Europe and the Americas, between the early modern and modern eras, between dependent colonies and the independent United States, between imperial regions (British America vis-a-vis New Spain, New France, and New Amsterdam), and along cultural and political borders with West Africa and indigenous America. Why should early Americanists want to keep track of so many other fields? Is all this borrowing cost-effective in time and energy? And who, if anyone, borrows from us? I cannot possibly survey all the relevant points of expansion in this essay; doing so would come close to replicating the problem I wish to analyze. Instead, I will look first at older border crossings (between colonial America and other nations or empires dominated by Europeans), then at newer ones (between early America and non-European populations). In the first section, I will consider the connections that early American history has with United States history, British history, and the histories of other New World empires; in the second, I will examine the borders early America now shares with African history and Native American history and look at the muffled impact of cultural studies, particularly postcolonial theories. I will not examine interdisciplinary borrowing in and of itself (which would take at least another essay) but will instead look at some ways early Americanists' interest in or chariness of new methodologies has affected their crossovers into other historical

Dorothy Shaver: Promoter of “The American Look”

Dorothy Shaver: Promoter of “The American Look”

Information Asymmetries in the Pricing of Fine Wines

A dynamic econometric model of wine auctions is estimated to measure the informational signalling impact of a wine critic on the return to the investment in fine wines. United States data suggests that critic Robert Parker is an influencer on the auction price of Bordeaux wines. Furthermore it appears that American buyers look toward the much larger European market in order to establish values. In doing so they may be able to mitigate the effects of asymmetric information.

Latin American Women Artists, Kahlo and Look Who Else: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography

Foreword Preface The Bibliography Individual Artists General Works Appendix I: Collective Exhibitions Appendix II: Artists by Country Name Index

Latin American women artists, Kahlo and look who else: a selective, annotated bibliography

Latin American women artists, Kahlo and look who else: a selective, annotated bibliography

"Siren Alps": The Lure of Europe for American Writers

"Siren Alps":The Lure of Europe for American Writers Jane Donahue Eberwein (bio) Dickinson's travels can be quickly summarized: a trip to Washington, a few stays in Boston and Cambridge, and at least one visit to Springfield. Obviously, she never shared the wanderlust of the Amherst urchin who ran away in indiscriminate search of "Vermont or Asia" (L685). Yet there was nothing landlocked about Dickinson's imagination. Geographic curiosity sparked at school found reinforcement in lifelong reading. Imagination carried her to Golconda, Peru, Austria. "I saw the sunrise on the Alps since I saw you," she wrote (L321), and again "to shut our eyes is Travel" (L354). A woman whose ebullient response to natural epiphanies convinced her that "Amherst has gone to Eden" (L354) felt little need for roaming. Even so, Dickinson apparently intuited pressures felt by traveling compatriots who balanced appreciation of Europe's cultures against Yankee loyalty. Some of her favorite authors entertained readers with idyllic accounts of foreign travel while always affirming the stronger claims of their homeland. Longfellow concluded Outre-Mer, for instance, by observing that "amid all the novelties of the Old World. . ., there were always fond regrets and longings after the land of my birth" (292), and her beloved Ik Marvel closed his revery of European wandering with reference to "the land we love better than Rome" (250). From such writings, she would have learned the appeal of that foreign yet familiar continent that gave geographic substance to an ancestral past Americans embraced only partially along with a possible future they tended to resist. Washington Irving identified the central terms of trans-Atlantic contrast in Geoffrey Crayon's genial self-introduction for The Sketch Book. Ignoring commercial goals that drew Irving himself to England, Crayon focuses on three incentives to travel, the first of which would have sent him [End Page 176] west rather than east. "No, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery," Crayon declares (8-9). In the same vein, William Cullen Bryant's sonnet "To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe" presents America's "Lone lakes—savannas where the bison roves" and "Skies, where the desert eagle wheels and screams" as far more stimulating to the painterly eye than Europe's "Fair scenes . . . fair, / But different" (232). What makes the European landscape different and both more and less enticing to Americans is "the trace of men" evident everywhere in "Paths, homes, graves, ruins." In Europe, there is no way of separating historical and social considerations from nature, and even nature looks jaded to eyes accustomed to wilderness. When Marvel describes the Appenines, he presents a strangely blasted mountain landscape in which "the wayside brooks do not seem to be the gentle offspring of bountiful hills, but the remnants of something greater" (177). Yet Dickinson drew her geographic glossary from all over the world, disregarding the Rocky Mountains for more exotically named ranges on distant continents, especially those of South America and Asia. In reference to European sites, she also disregarded architecture that transformed the landscape with the imprint of human creativity, neglecting Marvel's parting glimpse of St. Peter's dome from the foothills of the Appenines (177). Roman architecture, obviously unrivalled by anything in the United States, dramatically displayed the second of Geoffrey Crayon's three inducements to travel and the first that justified abandoning his native hemisphere. Acknowledging the appeal of the old world's "storied and poetical association," Crayon explained his departure for Europe: "There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local customs" (9). Viewing his own country as "full of youthful promise" in contrast to Europe's wealth in "the accumulated treasures of age," Crayon took off in search of historical and aesthetic enrichment, just as Bryant advised Thomas Cole to do so that he could develop artistry needed to express the new world. Literary artists had less need than painters for European cultivation, obviously, since books were readily imported. Still, authors looked abroad for imaginative stimuli. What most struck American authors in their discoveries of the European past, however, was not...