American in vogue: refashioning national and transnational culture, 1945-1980

Abstract

This dissertation is a micro-history of America’s pre-eminent fashion magazine, Vogue, which serves to tell the larger history of American culture during the postwar period. By examining Vogue’s commercial and editorial content between 1945 and 1980, I argue that new dynamics emerge in America’s national and transnational life. I demonstrate that postwar issues of Vogue reveal: a persistent preoccupation with imported, European sartorial culture which complicates monocultural notions of the American Century; new divisions, as well as overlooked harmonies, within America’s blossoming consumer culture; and the broader nature of pivotal debates over individualism and women’s rights. Through a close analysis of Vogue, this dissertation seeks to re-examine, and complicate, the history of gender, class, and national identity within America’s postwar consumer culture. Focusing on articles, adverts and photographs that appeared within the magazine, and contextualizing this content by drawing on the memoirs of contemporary fashion designers and magazine editors, this dissertation provides the first academic history of American Vogue in the postwar period. In using Vogue to profitably re-encounter postwar America through the underexplored lens of fashion, this dissertation also demonstrates the validity of fashion magazines as sources for historical enquiry more generally.