"Screen Style: Introduction" Sarah Berry - 2000

Berry is the furthest away from 2nd Wave Feminists of last week. She is involved much more in the celebratory, agency and pleasure aspect of feminist theory. This is easier if you zoom into a micro view like she does with her case study of 1930s fashion. Berry and Young are both relatively optimistic. Berry is complicating the side of production. Men in Hollywood are largely immigrants and their own upward mobility and relation to power is very complex. 1930s are a moment when women are entering the service industries more. Subjective feeling of emancipation often doesn’t take you very far. Rabine and Berry are at odds. Berry’s tone is sometimes refreshing, sometimes optimistic, empiricist and historical, but possibly not as much as it should be. (Refer to Patty's post, I think she has problems with Berry's argument.)

"[Hollywood-Style Center of the World (1939)] represents mass-market fashion as a democratic leveling of social distinctions" where the film acts a shop window of the latest fashions to small town, rural America. (p.xii) Industrial revolution and catalogs, department chain stores allowed for wealthy women's Paris fashion trends to be adopted by lower class much faster. Looking at popular fashion in the 1930s "as an aspect of women's negotiation of modernity and post-traditional identity (the shift from hereditary caste systems to capitalist social divisions)." (p.xiii) Also marks a time when shift (according to Marxists) from people being identified by what the consume vs. what they produce, but women have always been identified with symbolic forms of beauty more so than their domestic labor, which was never given as much significance as men's labor so the impact of this shift on women's identities is more complex.

Women are seen as primary consumers and targets of Hollywood films. Social status was presented in these films as a matter of appearance, not breeding, and could therefore be imitated. Fashion was the way to be upwardly mobile as the "self-made men" of Hollywood's studios were. "Popular fashion discourses of this decade emphasized the demystification of upper-class glamor in ways that underscored the economic basis, rather than the inherent social superiority, of upper class culture." (p.xix) Reflecting the American ideal of meritocracy vs. aristocracy. Chapter 2 talks about fashion related to Stars, performance and gender. Chapter 3 is about make-up and Chapter 4 is about women adopting men's fashion for upward mobility.