Resumen de New leaves: fashionable reading and literary celebrity in british vogue (1918-1939)
This thesis explores British Vogue’s role as a cultural intermediary during the interwar period (1918-1939).
Through a close reading of its essays, literary reviews, social chronicles and portraits of writers, and in the context of the Battle of the Brows, it argues that it always counted literary practices as expressions of taste.
From the theoretical framework of Fashion and Gender Studies, and within the fields of Middlebrow and Modernist Periodical Studies, this thesis argues that, despite its changing priorities and its move near and then away from a highbrow position, Vogue continually valued sophistication and playfulness and can be approached as a middlebrow text. The first chapter discusses Vogue’s function as a guide to modern practices of consumption and taste and explores the interplay between those practices, identity and social affiliation. Vogue articulated “smartness” both on the page and behind the scenes. Its editors promoted certain writers and approaches to literature as fashionable, but they were also expected to live according to the values of their managers. The second chapter explains how British Vogue became a modernist project during the editorship of Dorothy Todd (1923-1926). Todd developed a network of avant-garde contributors: however, Vogue was above all a fashion magazine, which went against the modernist ideals of art as free from commercial interest and the author as lone genius. Vogue promoted literary figures as celebrities, supporting different visions of modern authorship that wove their bodies and sartorial tastes with their artistic creation and reception. The third chapter locates the magazine in the “Battle of the Brows” during the less studied editorships of Alison Settle (1927-1936) and Elizabeth Penrose (1936-1939). Its content shifted through its alliance with the Bright Young People, and the space allotted to literature was reduced. Vogue’s editorial line now leant even more firmly towards middlebrow tastes, pushing a sensible sort of sophistication. Its vision of literary celebrity split into two models: middlebrow writers and glamorous society figures that happened to be writers.
