Fashion, Consumption, Politics

Bloomer costume, 1851 An anonymous entertainer jitterbugging alone on stage wearing a zoot suit costume. Notice the extended forefingers.

Cover, Essence Magazine, May 1970

1939 McCal’s pattern Suit style: High waist, padded shoulders

The zoot suit has earned its reputation as an outlaw. What other fashion item can say a riot was named for it and a government agency declared it illegal?

Mary Rourke Los, Angeles Times. 1996. Outlaw zoot suit lives on in fashion, folklore. The Commercial Appeal, Aug 18. http://ezproxy.middlebury.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/

docview/393699856?accountid=12447.

Young meen in zoot suits in the 1930s(photo from hj0912.blogspot.com) Pachucos being arrested for violating LA County ordinance

Zoot suit was: Emblem of ethnicity Way of negotiating an

identity Refusal of subservience

Pachucas and Police ,1943

Wartime Context

New York Primary School Children in 1942

Marion Post Wolcott.Negro Man Entering Movie Theatre by "Colored" Entrance. Belzoni, Mississippi, in the delta area.October 1939.

WWII Porpaganda posters, NARA.gov

In-Class Exercise Read “Zoot-Suit Fighting

Spreads on the West Coast,” Los Angeles Times, 10 June 1943, p. 23.

How do the article and accompanying images speak to Cosgrove’s analysis in “The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare”?

Gender, Race, and Wartime Style

“Fifth Column Fashion” It was simultaneously the garb of the victim and the attacker, the persecutor and the persecuted. . . But the central opposition was between the style of the delinquent and that of the disinherited. To wear a zoot suit was to risk the repressive intolerance of wartime society and to incite the attention of the police, the parent generation and the uniformed members of the armed forces. For many pachucos the zoot-suit riots were simply hightimes in Los Angeles when momentarily they had control of the streets, for others it was a realization that they were outcasts in a society than was not of their making. （ 352）

Robert Weems on African-American Women as Beauty Product

Consumers

Many African Americans continue to view consumerism, and in fact, conspicuous consumption, as a means to separate themselves from a “degraded past.” (166)

vintage ad for various skin lightening agentshttp://www.tumblr.com/tagged/skin%20lightening

What about black companies that marketed personal care/beauty products to black women? Were they selling African American women “whiteness” or something else entirely? (167)

http://0.tqn.com/d/inventors/1/0/j/K/walkerad.jpg

Selling whiteness?

Madam Walker Beauty ad, Library of Congress

Weems writes that “most of the racially derogatory hair straightening ads . . . were produced by white-owned companies” (169).

Image: Flickr user SA_Steve

Jheri Curl phenomenon of the late 1970s (171)

Fashion Fair cosmetics (172)

Essence Magazine,established 1970

by the 1990s white-owned cosmetic and personal care products companies had dramatically expanded their control of this part of the overall African American consumer market. (174)

Maybelline Shades of You (1991)

Estee Lauder (1991)

Maybelline mascara ad

Estee Lauder Skin Illuminator ad

What happened to the African American beauty entrepreneur?