Design for (Queer) Living: Sexual Identity, Performance, and Decor in British Vogue, 1922-1926

There is something queer about archives, places of paradigmatic institutionality (careful filing systems, rows of desks, workers concentrating over laptop computers or boxes of index cards) dedicated to preserving some of the least institutional forms of documents (rough drafts, private letters, ephemeral newspapers and magazines). As institutions that protect and publicize materials classed as outdated, unproductive, or private, archives queer the values of other institutions, from the police to the academy, turning the mechanisms of institutionality against institutional authority.¹ This dynamic is clear in relation to the history of modern sexual identities, which so often have been structured in opposition to institutional authority. Suppressed by or excluded from dominant institutions, evidence of sex/gender transgression fills all manner of archives, providing the basis for much of the last three decades' most meaningful scholarship in sexuality.

Of course, the institutions of which archives are often a part sometimes act to thwart their queer potential, culling controversial material or restricting access to it. Archives sustain their own institutional hierarchies, moreover, with priority given to the rare or unique. But as social constructs, the histories of sexual identities are often recorded in forms of mass culture that archives are reluctant to hold. And if mass culture in general has been dismissed as modernism's effeminate "other," fashion magazines may be its queer: obsessed with unproductive gossip and transient role-playing, openly courting the homoerotic gaze.² An archive of fashion magazines is, therefore, doubly marginalized, doubly queer. No American library, and very few British libraries, for instance, preserve British Vogue from the 1920s, and few scholars have attended to its place in the history of feminism or sexual identity. Indeed, the few scholars who admit to examining British Vogue have scurried to assert their critical distance from what they study. A history of three centuries of British women's magazines published thirty-five years ago complains that, in the 1920s, Vogue's "garish and esoteric assortment of fashions designed to appeal to those with extravagant tastes and ample resources . . . transformed the simple desire to be well-dressed into an exorbitantly expensive and time-consuming profession, beyond the reach of all but the most affluent."³ This opposition of the "garish and esoteric" against the "desire to be well-dressed"—an impulse presented as so "simple" as to preclude analysis—probably reveals a good deal about the tenuous status of women in academe in 1970, but obscures (at least) two of the most interesting aspects of British Vogue: the substantial portions of the magazine that did not deal with clothes and the aspirational forms of readership that might prompt readers without "ample resources" to exercise "extravagant tastes."⁴ A more recent generation's scholarly prejudices are reflected in condemnation of British Vogue's "silent collusion in the promotion of a heteronormative agenda," an a priori assumption apparently powerful enough to dictate its supporting claim that "nothing that evinced a homoerotic sensibility . . . ever made it onto Vogue's pages."⁵

To my eye, in contrast, almost every page of the arts and culture coverage in British Vogue during the 1920s is queer—intriguingly, delightfully, powerfully queer. I intend "queer" here in its broadest sense, to indicate an attitude that delights in destabilizing institutionally sanctioned hierarchies. British Vogue at this time was remarkable for unsettling the hierarchies that, to this day, distinguish "art" and "design" from "fashion" and "decoration," and (perhaps accounting for the consternation Vogue has aroused in academics) the publishing organs of the intelligentsia from mass-circulation magazines.⁶ I also intend "queer" in its newer and narrower sense, to indicate identities constructed around nonnormative conceptions of gender and sexuality. Vogue's enthusiasm for androgynous eroticism in this period links its sensibility to this form of queerness as well.⁷

Recent scholarship on sexual identity has persuasively argued for the historical importance of physique magazines in the creation of gay consciousness after World War II.⁸ British Vogue prefigures this dynamic in ways that are significant both because they confirm the importance of the mass media to the history of sexuality and because...