Jon Cockburn’s Journal Article Olivetti and the Missing Third: Fashion, Working Women, and Images of the Mechanical-Flâneuse in the 1920s and 1930s.
By Sarah
Burke
Complete citation:
Cockburn, Jon. “Olivetti and the Missing Third: Fashion, Working Women and Images of the
Mechanical-flâneuse in the 1920s and 1930s. Fashion Theory, vol.19, no.5, 2015, pp. 637-686. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2015.1071069
Advertisements in The Home, 1 November 1937. Shows modern technology being used by, and aspired by women.
Key Words: Images, modernity, advertisements,
mechanical progress, feminism, Vogue.
Brief Overview:
Detailed analysis of woman
as the mechanical-flâneuse, a type of flaneur portrayed by women in
images in the 1920s and 1930s to symbolise privilege and independence. The act of being a flâneur was a literary and
artistic movement that was once only afforded to men. An observer-participant
activity that required a person of affluence and modernity to be seen in the
streets as a wanderer, and discoverer.
Women however were slow to being afforded such freedom of movement, so
they took to machinery and invention as a way of portraying themselves as
modern women.
Summary of key points:
The advertised image of a flâneuse allowed women
to negotiate their way through social, educational, and employment changes. As the author explains, it was previously a performance only for men, yet, with the advent of new technology and machinery, it allowed woman an avenue for self-presentation, and self-identify becoming active members
of modernity. Images in advertising for Vogue, movie advertisements, and technology advertisements are used as
examples of the technological performance of woman. Women, through technology, had access to; travel, education, a wider choice in employment, and more time to
socialise, and was advertised to them via images of women engaging as the modern flaneuse.
Important Quotations:
“it is ”…a
re-examination of the presence of all kinds of women on the city streets” and
identifies “women who were not necessarily prostitutes or other working women,
out shopping or on a philanthropic mission, but women of all classes and
identities tracing paths and lives in the spaces of the city.” ” (639).
“A relationship exists between actively participating in modernity (being a
modernist) and the concentrated self-awareness of being modern that is often
captured in a variety of media” (648).
“It is the stare of the mechanical-flâneuse: it is not an evacuation
of the present, or a negation of the modern, but a going away so as to be at
rest or adrift within modernity” (671).
Usefulness to our group topic or individual project:
This journal article gives
some meaning to the way that images were used in advertisements to make comfortable
the commercialisation of modernity to women. A flâneuse
is a woman who is engaged with her surroundings, can go where the action is,
and be seen discovering the world around her.
The ability to be
independent was important to the feminist movement in the 1920s and
1930s. Magazines that portrayed images of woman actively using technology in an
independent way was also an advertisement towards liberation from patriarchal
conformity, publicly reproducing the definitions of who they could be aspire to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment