Work!: A Queer History of Modeling

by Elspeth H. Brown

From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American consumer culture. In Work! Elspeth H. Brown traces the history of modeling from the advent of photographic modeling in the early twentieth century to the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s. Brown outlines how the modeling industry sanitized and commercialized models' sex appeal in order to elicit and channel desire into buying goods. She shows how this new form of sexuality—whether exhibited in the Ziegfeld Follies girls' performance of Anglo-Saxon femininity or in African American models' portrayal of black glamour in the 1960s—became a central element in consumer capitalism and a practice that has always been shaped by queer sensibilities. By outlining the paradox that queerness lies at the center of capitalist heteronormativity and telling the largely unknown story of queer models and photographers, Brown offers an out of the ordinary history of twentieth-century American culture and capitalism.

Genres: Fashion, History, Queer, Nonfiction, Gender, LGBT, Gender and Sexuality

368 pages, Paperback

Published May 28, 2019

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Queer people are responsible for some of the most significant contributions to fashion/beauty industries. However, our aesthetics made it onto the covers, not our bodies.

1) Aesthetic industries were some of the few jobs white gender non-conforming feminine people could work in the early 1900s. Fairies (a term for “effeminate” “males”) were known for their camp aesthetic sensibility. Baron Adolph de Meyer brought camp – artificial lighting, object-oriented enthusiasm, dramatic poses -- to mainstream fashion as the first staff fashion photographer at Vogue. During the Great Depression, photography – a cheaper alternative to paintings – circulated to the masses. Queer aesthetics went mainstream.

2) The sexuality of white women’s models was contained as a way to differentiate modeling from sex work. This was done at the expense of nonwhite models who were typecast as hyper-sexual. (Think here about the fine art distinction of the white nude from racialized nakedness). Prior to “glamour” the word “vamp” was used to describe elevated beauty. “Vamp” was historically associated with Jewish/ Eastern European immigrants. White film industries drew aesthetics from these communities to make “white beauty safe for sexual allure.” In modeling white women were initially trained in statuesque poses, which was seen in contrast to the “primitive displays” of excessive gesture. Eventually, white models were trained by Black choreographies such as Ethel Williams in secret.

3) Departing from a critique of systems of oppression, white cultural feminists in the 70s critiqued individual women’s appearances as duped by the patriarchal/market construction of femininity. In contradiction to the alleged artifice of beauty/fashion industries, feminists emphasized women’s presumed biological differences as the ultimate site of nature. Fashion aesthetics moved from camp/glamour toward the “Breck Girl,” whose image connoted “authenticity.” But this authenticity was just as contrived as the “Glamour Girl.” Biological essentialism – culturally conflating womanhood with fertility with authenticity – made it such that transfeminine models had to be stealth until the 1980s, or later.

I just thought this book was so fantastic and I've been raving about it to everyone. There is so much helpful history and theory here which helps explain contemporary beauty and fashion industries so well. Also, I really appreciate Brown's engagement with aesthetics as a material site of power. So often beauty/aesthetics are dismissed as legitimate terrains of politics and theory, but this book reminds us how important they are for us to formulate how dynamics of power are operating.

[Ella · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can tell the author of this is a historian of advertising, because the stuff dealing with advertising and the grown of white mainstream companies marketing to Black consumers in the 50s and 60s is fantastic. It’s when the book starts going dumb jargon-y places trying to do queer history in the most annoying up-its-own-ass way possible that I got frustrated to all hell and back.