Man Appeal: Advertising, Modernism, and Menswear, and: Twentieth-Century American Fashion (review)

Since the New Millennium, the study of fashion and apparel has blossomed as an academic subdiscipline, riding on the achievements of curatorial pioneers like Claudia Kidwell and the next generation of historians, Valerie Steele and Christopher Breward. In the publishing world, Berg Press has capitalized on the fervor with the journal Fashion Theory and the dress, body, and culture book series. Over the past decade, more than three dozen books—monographs and edited volumes—have come out of the dress, body, and culture series. Many of these books are written by scholars of cultural studies, home economics professors, sociologists, fashion practitioners, and textile and costume curators. Berg's offerings are wonderfully suggestive, pointing to ways in which business and economic historians may contribute to the thriving field of fashion studies.

Paul Jobling, a scholar from the University of Brighton, provides a welcome analysis of British men's fashion advertising in the early twentieth century. His seven chapters cover the development of menswear advertising, readers' responses, the contributions of market research, modernist influences in commercial art, tailors as a specialized type of advertiser, the impact of World War II, and spectatorship involved underwear advertising. If this sounds a bit like cultural studies, the observation is on target. More accurately, Jobling takes a sociological approach of culture, examining the representation of fashion in promotional imagery, rather than the clothing itself. He makes his position clear from the onset, telling the reader that his historical study will examine publicity in the menswear industry. Jobling is concerned about documenting how changes in clothes and clothing industry shaped new forms and styles of publicity, and how the material aspects of the clothing were depicted in posters and magazine advertisements.

Jobling's book is tethered to solid archival research—he admirably read sevenmajor trade journals dating from 1895 to 1959—and shows how rich these materials can be for fashion historians. He extrapolated important material on consumer psychology, market research and target audiences, the roles of the commercial artist and copyrighter, and aesthetic debates within agencies on layout and illustration. He also used historical collections from several advertising agencies. The book includes a nice analysis of how British menswear advertising overlapped with market research to create new ways of classifying readers' preferences. Jobling climbs up and down the social ladder, examining the traditional material of advertising history—ads from mass-circulation magazines—but adds a refreshing twist by looking at subway posters and newspaper ads. It is a study that could have been done by a business historian of the cultural turn.

Linda Welters, a professor in the Department of Textiles, Fashion Merchandising, and Design at the University of Rhode Island and Patricia A. Cunningham, a professor in the Department of Consumer Sciences at Ohio State University, are co-editors of Twentieth-Century American Fashion, which is part of the dress, body, and culture series. The book contains twelve essays on a range of topics: fashion in Newport's Gilded Age, subcultural style in Greenwich Village, Jazz Age influences on women's attire, sportswear and the movies in the Great Depression, American designers during World War II, the Onondaga Silk Company's American Artist fabrics, Beat Generation, Space Age, Yuppie and Hip-Hop fashions, and the influence of TV on 1980s glamour. These are all admirable topics, and many of the essays contain useful insights. Patricia Campbell Warner's essay, "The Americanization of Fashion: Sportswear, the Movies and the 1930s," considers familiar motifs, including the famous Joan Crawford dress from Letty Lynton (1933), but pushes the envelope with a discussion of product placement and dissemination. Here, we learn something about...