This is the story of clothes as pictures and of the importance and meanings of the way we picture clothes.
Focusing on the rapid changes of the interwar period, fashion is explored as a sensory interplay of images. From illustrations to editorial spreads, and amateur snapshots to Hollywood film, Documenting Fashion considers how American fashion was represented and created by visual culture. The chapters comprise thematic case studies of interconnected images that build to create a discussion of fashion as embodied experience, foregrounding the way that all viewers are also wearers, consuming magazines and other types of images, just as they purchase clothing and accessories.
Examining how mediums constructed and impacted the meaning of fashion during the 1920s and 1930s, the book tracks interconnections between technologies that developed in, for example, handheld cameras and Technicolor and Kodachrome color film. Aspects of photography itself are also considered such as hybrid and manipulated images, as well as light, shadow and colour’s impact on depictions of fashion and the body. Newspapers, fashion and women’s magazines such as Vogue and The Delineator are analysed alongside examples from the Black media, including Abbott’s Monthly Magazine and The Afro-American.
Conceived as a revisionist history, diverse types of images of Black, white and Chinese Americans are analysed to argue for a more rounded examination of the ways dress, style and self-image were represented in still and moving images and how such imagery created a particularly American vision of vernacular modernity.
By:
Rebecca Arnold
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 232mm,
Width: 154mm,
Spine: 20mm
Weight: 540g
ISBN: 9781350603790
ISBN 10: 1350603791
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 21 May 2026
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1: 1920s 1: Fashion, Images and Materiality Camera and Materiality Camera and Body Looking, Wearing 2: Leisure, Work and Surveillance Travel, Trends and Aspirations Cities, Anonymity and Spectacle 3: Documenting, Passing and Resisting Adapting and Performing Passing Identifying with Images Part 2: 1930s 4: Between Illustration and Photography Flou Picturing Fashion 5: Shadows, Light and Hollywood Gold Diggers of 1933 Light and Shadow 6: Colour, Emotion and Modernity Colour Processes and ‘Intimate Publics’ Colour, Luxury and Modernity Coda Notes Bibliography Index
Rebecca Arnold is a historian who has held posts at The Courtauld Institute, Royal College of Art & Central Saint Martins, London, UK. Her publications include The American Look, Fashion: A Very Short Introduction, and Avedon Advertising with Laura Avedon and James Martin.
Reviews for Documenting Fashion: Dress and Visual Culture in 1920s and 1930s America
Arnold's book gives us a fascinating and more inclusive look at radical shifts in self-fashioning in 1920s and 1930s America. Documenting Fashion enhances our own view of how technologies and embodied experiences of dress played out on camera, on screen and in advertising and print media. * Alison Matthews David, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada *
