ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit. -Cab Calloway,The Hepster's Dictionary, 1944 Before the fashion statements of hippies, punks, or hip-hop, ...there was the zoot suit, a striking urban look of the World War II era that captivated the imagination. Created by poor African American men and obscure tailors, the "drape shape" was embraced by Mexican American pachucos, working-class youth, entertainers, and swing dancers, yet condemned by the U.S. government as wasteful and unpatriotic in a time of war. The fashion became notorious when it appeared to trigger violence and disorder in Los Angeles in 1943-events forever known as the "zoot suit riot." In its wake, social scientists, psychiatrists, journalists, and politicians all tried to explain the riddle of the zoot suit, transforming it into a multifaceted symbol: to some, a sign of social deviance and psychological disturbance, to others, a gesture of resistance against racial prejudice and discrimination. As controversy swirled at home, young men in other places-French zazous, South African tsotsi, Trinidadian saga boys, and Russian stiliagi-made the American zoot suit their own. InZoot Suit, historian Kathy Peiss explores this extreme fashion and its mysterious career during World War II and after, as it spread from Harlem across the United States and around the world. She traces the unfolding history of this style and its importance to the youth who adopted it as their uniform, and at the same time considers the way public figures, experts, political activists, and historians have interpreted it. This outré style was a turning point in the way we understand the meaning of clothing as an expression of social conditions and power relations. Zoot Suit offers a new perspective on youth culture and the politics of style, tracing the seam between fashion and social action.
How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a "kitchen physic," as homemade cosmetics were once called, become a ...multibillion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman's business? InHope in a Jar, historian Kathy Peiss gives us the first full-scale social history of America's beauty culture, from the buttermilk and rice powder recommended by Victorian recipe books to the mass-produced products of our contemporary consumer age. She shows how women, far from being pawns and victims, used makeup to declare their freedom, identity, and sexual allure as they flocked to enter public life. And she highlights the leading role of white and black women-Helena Rubenstein and Annie Turnbo Malone, Elizabeth Arden and Madame C. J. Walker-in shaping a unique industry that relied less on advertising than on women's customs of visiting and conversation. Replete with the voices and experiences of ordinary women,Hope in a Jaris a richly textured account of the ways women created the cosmetics industry and cosmetics created the modern woman.
In 1938 Mademoiselle magazine reported that the cosmetics firm Volupté had produced two new lipsticks for the market. These were “lipstick for types”: one for “girls who lean toward pale-lacquered ...nails, quiet smart clothes and tiny strands of pearls”; the other “for the girl who loves exciting clothes, pins a strass pin big as a saucer to her dress, and likes to be just a leetle bit shocking.” One had a “soft mat finish” while the other covered the lips “with a gleaming lustre.” The names given to these lipsticks were, respectively, Lady and Hussy. As Mademoiselle put it, “Each
Kathy Peiss knocks the established literature akilter in her study of the zoot suit. This flashy, over-the-top garb of the 1940s has long been studied as a uniform of hipsters and pachucos in the ...United States, who were targeted for violent repression by white police and servicemen in the 1943 “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles. Peiss audaciously opens up her study to discuss the signifier of the zoot suit internationally. In a tour de force, she outlines the sense of cultural identity fostered among zoot suiters and allied long-coat wearers, as well as the political meanings assigned to them, in such diverse places as Mexico, Trinidad, South Africa, and the USSR during the 1940s.
For the first time in U.S. history, the protection of books and other cultural resources became an official war aim during World War II. Examining the broad historical process by which this policy ...was formed and executed, this article focuses on three key factors: the new role of intellectual and cultural elites, who forged close ties with the state; the expansion of intelligence gathering and its unintended consequences for the preservation of cultural material; and the extraordinary actions of individual librarians, curators, and ordinary soldiers on the ground, who improvised solutions to the problems of preservation and restoration.
Less than half a century ago, the subject of women and gender barely registered in the scholarship and teaching of American historians. In remarkably short order, uncovering women’s past became a ...political imperative and intellectual passion, and then emerged as a legitimate area of professional inquiry and research. With some distance from its origins, it is now possible to consider women’s and gender history as particular forms of knowledge production that grew out of broad intellectual, social, and political developments in the post-World War II period. This chapter focuses on four conceptual “turns” in the field, and how they have
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