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Rebecca is a Senior Lecturer and runs the degree pathway in Fashion History and Theory. She has an M.A. in the History of Dress from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She has lectured internationally, including at the Royal College of Art, London, F.I.T. and Parsons School of Art in New York and at the University of Urbino, Italy. She has published widely on contemporary fashion in academic journals and compilations and her first book was published in 2001.
During the interwar years, women were encouraged to re-form their bodies in line with constructed ideals of health, youth and athleticism. Magazines provided guidelines for diets and exercise regimes that would tone and slim the female figure to make it 'modern'. As young women rejected the heavy corsetting that had shaped and contained their predecessors' bodies, they turned to calisthenics, eating plans or diet pills both to control their bodies' appearance from within and to conform to fashionable notions of acceptable femininity. In Paris, couturier Madeleine Vionnet took her cue from classical statuary to create draped dresses that skimmed the figure and produced fluid lines that evoked Isadora Duncan's Greek-inspired dance moves. In New York in the 1930s and 1940s however, it was readymade sportswear, as exemplified by Claire McCardell's work, that promoted the ideal of a modern body. Since the late 19th century college girls had been taught to develop not just their mind, but also their bodies through involvement in sport and outdoor activities. The athletic ideal that developed was linked to ideas of a distinctively American vision of modern identity that was evident in fashion photography, clothing design and contemporary dance. Designers in America reconfigured the elite lines of Parisian couture to produce easy-to-wear designs, which allowed women to move with ease.
This paper will investigate the relationship between ideals of the body as expressed in American fashion, and attitudes towards the social role of women in the 1930s and 1940s.
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