Dying to Fit In: When in Rome — The Fashion-Beauty Complex and the Making of Whiteness, 1910-1925
Loading...
Start Date
23-4-2026 12:00 AM
Description
The American fashion-beauty complex from 1910 to 1925 served as a technology of Whiteness and aided in the assimilation of European immigrants, as shown through the major publications of the day such as Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, and the Woman's Home Companion. These magazines constructed a slender, fair, disciplined body as the price of admission to American identity. This project shows how the print media promoted the American ideal during a period of mass migration and eugenicist panic. Drawing from fashion plates, advice columns, advertisements, and fiction from these periodicals, alongside reducing guides, this paper examines attempts at racial formation during the early 20th century. It argues that the fashion-beauty complex did not merely reflect the burgeoning American fashion aesthetic, but actively taught Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish women to erase ethnic markers through diet, grooming, reducing garments, and the policing of "degenerate" fashion. Through examining how the same periodicals exoticized distant cultures (Bulgarian, Japanese, Mexican) while erasing threatening ones (Italian, Spanish), this project shows the flexible and consumptive nature of Whiteness. The cost of admission, for the women who wished to fit in, was a lifetime of discipline, restriction, and the erasure of one’s own culture.
Recommended Citation
Brown, Emerald, "Dying to Fit In: When in Rome — The Fashion-Beauty Complex and the Making of Whiteness, 1910-1925" (2026). 2026 Student Academic Showcase. 15.
https://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/src_2026/oral_presentation/1/15
Dying to Fit In: When in Rome — The Fashion-Beauty Complex and the Making of Whiteness, 1910-1925
The American fashion-beauty complex from 1910 to 1925 served as a technology of Whiteness and aided in the assimilation of European immigrants, as shown through the major publications of the day such as Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, and the Woman's Home Companion. These magazines constructed a slender, fair, disciplined body as the price of admission to American identity. This project shows how the print media promoted the American ideal during a period of mass migration and eugenicist panic. Drawing from fashion plates, advice columns, advertisements, and fiction from these periodicals, alongside reducing guides, this paper examines attempts at racial formation during the early 20th century. It argues that the fashion-beauty complex did not merely reflect the burgeoning American fashion aesthetic, but actively taught Irish, Italian, Polish, and Jewish women to erase ethnic markers through diet, grooming, reducing garments, and the policing of "degenerate" fashion. Through examining how the same periodicals exoticized distant cultures (Bulgarian, Japanese, Mexican) while erasing threatening ones (Italian, Spanish), this project shows the flexible and consumptive nature of Whiteness. The cost of admission, for the women who wished to fit in, was a lifetime of discipline, restriction, and the erasure of one’s own culture.