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THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 199-203
© 2001 National Communication Association

Determination and Style—1930s Hollywood and Women’s Lives

Helen Sterk

Sarah Berry. Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 234 pages. $25.95 (cloth); $20.76 (paper).

Think of women in the 1930s. In the absence of personal knowledge of the time, images of Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo most likely shape your thoughts. Feisty, courageous, able to meet challenges, these determined women stamped the era with their personalities and styles. In the films of the day, these actresses epitomized class in films such as Jezabel and Easy Street, reigned over royal spectacles in Queen Christina and Mary of Scotland, oozed exoticism in Mata Hari and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, and made their way in the business world in Skyscraper Souls and Big Business Girl. Film has made it possible for us to glimpse into the culture of the 1930s—as seen through the eyes of Hollywood. Even more interestingly, argues Sarah Berry in her first scholarly book, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood, these pictures offer us a bridge into the lives of women in the 1930s.

Classic theories of the dynamics that drive women’s fashion, especially as articulated by James Laver, historian and social critic of costume, argue that the “seduction principle” motivates wealthy women’s fashion choices. Berry suggests Laver’s articulation of a single cause ignores other good reasons for haute couture’s style changes and women’s style choices.

When women entered the work force, a social world not subject to the norms of home and “society,” they were faced with questions of self-presentation and performance that were not answered adequately by the “seduction principle.” Influences on their choices included cues given by the setting of the workplace, surely. Further, however, women realized, through their exposure to film and their own enactment, that dress was a means by which women could cross class barriers through dressing appropriately. And Hollywood presented a wide range of style possibilities, thereby presenting role models.

This brief, well-argued, thoroughly researched and supported book depicts Hollywood as a potent avenue of agency for women in a country gripped by the Depression. More than escape, Berry argues, the movies’ “use of costume to parody, invert and denaturalize social distinctions may have been a significant part of Hollywood cinema’s entertainment value, along with its demystification of specific codes of behavior, dress, and entitlement” (xxi). Through narratives that featured women able to change circumstances, film’s visual spectacle provided models of dress. Thanks to industrialization, the dresses seen on the screen could be translated quickly into ones that could be purchased in one’s home department store, no matter how small the town. Unlike the fashions of an earlier day, handmade by designers, then interpreted by means of dresses on costume dolls or patterns in publication such as Godey’s Ladies Book, making their way slowly down the economic chain, Hollywood styles were accessible to almost everyone almost as soon as they were seen on the screen.

Far from trivial, this point about accessibility of Hollywood-inspired dresses is worked by Berry into a sophisticated, complex argument about how cultural life changed when the technology of film provided a key source of entertainment. Through entertainment, the films of the 1930s modeled women whose characteristic strength and stylistic glamour contrasted with Depression era women’s lives and inspired them with hope for bettering their own lives.

The four substantive chapters of Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood move readers through different ways in which the look of female stars was made available to women audiences.

After lucidly setting the stage for her overall argument in the introduction, Berry explains how Hollywood’s fashions were marketed to women through advertising. The advertising of the day, according to Berry, contained a deep structure of belief in the mental simplicity of their audiences, assuming a fourteen-year-old mentality for women (5). Ads presented women with types and encouraged them to see themselves as “dramatic, ingenue, [or] athletic” (7). Placed in ads that played up their association with one or another of those types, stars reinforced the idea that, through dressing the part, a woman could pass as if she were that type of person. And if dress could suggest type, it could suggest also class. Dressing as if one were of a different class is all it takes, the ads and films imply, to be accepted as of that class.

Throughout this chapter and the others, Berry works with a wealth of support material. Drawing upon fashion and film magazines of the day, pertinent current research on dress, and a variety of films exemplifying the argument, Berry ends each chapter focusing on several movies that best present the narratives and images that underlie the point of the chapter.

In the chapter on fashion and class, Berry focuses on The Bride Wore Red, starring Joan Crawford as a poor singer who is dressed up as a society woman by a man trying to win a bet, and Easy Living, starring Jean Arthur as a working-class woman whose life is changed when a fur coat is tossed from a penthouse and lands on her head.  Opening an imaginative space in which class could be erased, Hollywood films depicted “a decade in which the codes of social status were identified and parodied, undermining commonly held notions that the rich were simply ‘different’ due to lineage and inimitable forms of cultivation” (46). Instead, clothes made the woman.

The genres of musical, costume melodrama, and historical drama provide another perspective on performativity. In these, stylish clothing again takes center stage. This time, the clothing is less closely associated with realism. Instead, the clothing “acts” along with the actor, standing as a metaphor for character, such as Scarlett O’Hara’s green velvet gown made from drapes, feigning a wealth she no longer owned.

Such clothing is “over the top,” worn to emphasize a point about the character (uniqueness) or the concept of woman (uniformity). An early distinction between the two can be seen in how the Ziegfeld Follies costumed for “multiplicity rather than uniformity,” (60) in which each woman was dressed thematically rather than uniformly; while in the Busby Berkeley productions, the women were dressed for uniformity of design and look.

Eventually, the emphasis lay more on uniformity than eccentricity, argues Berry. So, being “in fashion” was more important than having a dress unlike anyone else’s: “Hollywood’s debunking of fashion exclusivity is directly linked to its promotion of consumer fashion, both in general and in direct merchandising tie-ins” (71). Imitations of the lavish costumes of the movies were available to women. For example, the chiffony, white, ruffled Letty Lynton dress, similar to the one worn by Joan Crawford in the film of the same name, was bought by thousands of women. Spectacle films drew attention visually to extravagant clothing, again suggesting that women could change who the world thought they were through what they chose to wear.

Hollywood presented women with compelling reasons to shed their inhibitions about wearing makeup by marketing “exoticism” to them in films such as Jungle Princess, Lost Horizon, Mata Hari, and The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Although all the chapters of the book accomplish important ends in the argument about the relations among women, class, race, marketing, and reasons for consumption, this one is outstanding. Its range of sources is extraordinary, stretching from the 1587 book Of Beauty by Gabriel de Minut to the popular magazine ads of the 1930s to a wealth of appropriate films. Berry shows convincingly that the use of cosmetics moved from a class to a mass market on the faces of working women in a service economy, exposed to the new Technicolor images of glamorous, exotic women.

Berry argues that movies played a large role in introducing women to the pleasures of pants and suits, both of which eventually made their way into everyday work and social life of women. Importantly, she suggests that more attention must be paid to the effect of the demands of a work setting on women’s dress in order to understand the “bottom up” promotion of suits and pants. According to Berry, women create social identity through the dress worn to work. They negotiate between “too masculine” and “too feminine” in order to accomplish a “professional” look. That look requires a judicious mix of both masculine and feminine elements. Seemingly, a kind of gender accommodation takes place when women enter a previously all male space.

The films of the day served a morality tale function, though, in that they encouraged women not to become too masculine: “Working women are presented as vulnerable to corruption and sexual predation, and female ambition is presented as a displacement of more ‘natural’ feminine desires for security and love” (164). These themes can be marked in films such as Employees’ Entrance, Skyscraper Souls, and Platinum Blonde. Freedom of physical and social expression offered women by suits and pants is reined in by contrasting limitations of feminine clothing. Feminine clothing is presented as that which brings true happiness, in the form of a husband, to the woman.

In Berry’s conclusion, she reiterates the central claim of the book—“This work has attempted to acknowledge both the economic basis of the connection between Hollywood and fashion and the contested nature of its cultural politics” (188). Those politics deconstructed traditional, historical categories of women, work, race, and class. The films of the 1930s both reflected and shaped the lives of women, showing tensions and resolutions, suggesting that, just as the heroines did, women could change their lives. And style is one way to show it.

I highly recommend this book. As a researcher of fashion and dress myself, I particularly appreciate the complexity of her analyses. Not content with single or simple causality, Berry considers a web of reasons why these films matter, and why their study can enrich our understanding of not only that era, but ours.

Berry’s method of analysis works well. Chapter by chapter, she introduces us to cultural and social materials to explain the history, economics, and warrants of the day; she then discusses a range of films that mirror and inform the period, and then focuses tightly in on several particularly pertinent ones, telling the stories, showing the images, and interpreting the results. Theoretically and methodologically, this book has much to recommend it. Scholars of semiotics, rhetoric, fashion, gender, and film will appreciate this book.

And finally, maybe most importantly, it is a great read. Anyone who loves movies for their visuals as well as their stories will find this book riveting.