Fashion Secrets

Eden Osucha: In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the American periodical press and its preoccupation with women’s sartorial fashions played a crucial role in constructing the racial climate of the era’s... [ view full abstract ]

Eden Osucha: In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the American periodical press and its preoccupation with women’s sartorial fashions played a crucial role in constructing the racial climate of the era’s commercial visual culture, in which blackness was stigmatized, denigrated, and conceptually keyed to the era’s negative understandings of media publicity. This paper examines, as a secretly disruptive historical instance of what Simone Brown terms “dark sousveillance,” the appropriation of late-nineteenth century ladies’ fashion press’s white “looks” for the Black female readers of Ringwood’s Journal of Afro-American Women's Fashion. This subscription-based magazine, published from 1891-1895, reproduced representations published elsewhere of white women in the latest fashions. In this way, the magazine invited readers to identify with images intended to exclude them, and encouraged the adoption of high fashion’s white looks.