Vogue: Made in the USA

While Beaton’s photographs have warranted mention in recent literature

examining the relationship of fashion and art, they are not

subject to closer analysis in these publications, focusing chiefly on collaborations between artists and fashion designers, the iconographie

dependence of fashion on art, or the influence of the latter on fashion.

Beaton’s images are marginalized here, too, just as in the work of

art historians.^ My goal, here, will be to examine these photographs

within the socio-historical context of the fashion magazine, to analyze

the dynamic between the paintings and the models and shed new light

on the function of Pollock’s works within the parameters of American

Vogue. Such an analysis provides the opportunity for a more detailed

examination of the relationship of art and fashion in the photographs,

as Richard Martin begins to do in his 1981 essay, as well as within the

magazine in the early 1950s. This perspective offers insight, as well,

into Beaton’s photos as a factor in an internal conflict at the magazine,

in which, as Alison Matthews David has shown. Vogue’s orientation on

European and French fashion and lifestyle collides with its identity as a

magazine for a specific, American upper-class audience (David 2006).

Ultimately, the question needing to be addressed is what role Beaton’s

images play in the liaison between American and French fashion.

Vogue: Made in the USA

American Vogue was bought in 1909 by Conde Nast, who established

the, then, weekly New York publication as a successful fashion magazine.”

Alison Matthews David puts its succinctly: “The real innovation

of Vogue was that it estabiished the US as an authoritative voice in the

realm of fashion, a domain where the US had previously been a net

importer and follower of Parisian couture trends” (David 2006: 14).

While this may be true, the focus of American Vogue’s fashion news remained

on France, thus providing access to French fashion for the upper

classes of the United States. With the advent of the First Worid War,

32 Anne Soll

however, the magazine’s focus began to shift, turning an eye, even from

an editorial perspective,’ to American fashion: “While |Vbg«e| maintained

privileged ties to Europe, it also began to embrace more populist

understandings of ‘authentic’ American taste and style in dress. This

new nationalism included a greater acceptance of mass-produced and

branded goods, an attitude which typifies American fashion design and

production in the twentieth century” (David 2006: 14). David points out

that from this point on the task of the magazine was, on the one hand,

to serve the growing patriotic consciousness of the US American elite

and, on the other, to continue to supply it with the latest fashion developments

from “old Europe.”* These two poles represent the elite’s own

fundamental ambivalence toward their “father lands” to which they

remained culturally tied, yet from which they also sought to emancipate

themselves (David 2006: 14).

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