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Women: A Cultural Review

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Fashioning Readers: The avant garde and British Vogue , 1920-9

Aurelea Mahood Published online: 05 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Aurelea Mahood (2002): Fashioning Readers: The avant garde and British Vogue , 1920-9, Women: A Cultural Review, 13:1, 37-47 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574040110097317

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ritish Vogue was launched in 1916 when the First World War prevented the continued importation of the magazine from the United States. A fashion paper for women of means, the magazine advised its readers how best to assume a distinctively chic and modern appearance. The editors provided detailed information for the discerning woman of fashion to consult assiduously. Special numbers according to the season in question explored such matters as dressing for winter sports, Ascot and Henley, the London season, the Scottish Highlands and French Riviera. Fashion was, however, not the magazines sole concern; society and sporting news competed with articles on motoring and interior decoration for the readers attention. Health and beauty advice appeared alongside travelogues and photographs of the aristocracy and debutantes. Editorials and articles with news of the London stage, the world of modern art and contemporary literature contributed to the skilfully mixed cocktail that was an issue of Vogue during the 1920s. The magazine strove to create an air of indispensability and urged its readers to subscribe to Vogue so as to not miss `a single detail of importance. A 1928 advertisement for the magazine claimed:

A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE is a dangerous thing . . . The woman who studies Vogue never makes mistakes; she knows not only half the truth but the other half which complements it. She has all the information ..................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ..................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ............
Women: a cultural review Vol. 13. No. 1. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0957404011009731 7

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........................ ..................... ....................... ...................... ....................... ..................... ............ there is about colours, materials, lines, ensembles, accessories, occasions. She acquires an underlying clothes sense which teaches her what to avoid . . . She doesnt indulge in the false economy of missing an issue of Vogue every now and then . . . Reading Vogue regularly is The Only Safe Way (Vogue, 11 January 1928, 72).

1 American publisher Conde Nast recognized the economic potential in a magazine that was authoritative in matters of taste and dress for a moneyed readership whose wants differed from those catered to by magazines aiming at mass popularity. At Vogue he created a magazine whose success would be dependent on advertising rather than sales revenue. For further discussion of Nast and the history of Vogue , see Chase 1954, Seebohm 1982 and Yoxall 1966.

The reader of Vogue did not misspend her dress allowance; instead she cleverly maintained her year-round chic with the help of the magazine. Being in fashion was a lesson to be learned carefully and thoroughly; the reader was re-educated issue to issue, season to season, so that she might present a graceful and seemingly natural silhouette a la mode . Instruction in acquisition extended beyond the fashion pages and informed the editorials and articles exploring a wide range of subjects from entertaining to book buying. `Book for the Morning-room Table appeared on a fortnightly basis and featured commentary on books that the reviewers had reputedly spied littering the tables of Mayfair hostesses and the literary set in Bloomsbury, adding to the magazines pressing tone of up-to-the-minute consumer chic. The project of Vogue might then be imagined as the production of an au courant femininity. Womens magazines exploit the theoretical supposition that no identity or unique self exists prior to imitation or acquisition. Our instinctsdress-sense or otherwiseare learned; with the continued study of a fashion paper, the possibility of distinguishing the imitation from the original is greatly diminished. The differences between the mannequin and the woman collapse as the reader acquires `an underlying clothes sense. The manifestation (or recognition) of a naturalized dress-sense occurs only by means of encounters with intermediaries versed in the art of reading fashion.1 The magazine is both text and mirror providing an image of a woman that the reader might choose to assume as an identity. In addressing the possibilities surrounding the construction of a modern woman, Vogue weaves a complex dialectic between high culture and fashion. This unexpected pairing reminds the critic that literary history is also a story of changing creative fashions and styles and, although we are perhaps more comfortable addressing the popular as found within the sanctioned boundaries of canonical texts such as Madame Bovary or Ulysses, the canonical slips provocatively and repeatedly into the realm of the non-literary or popular. This slipping of boundaries characterizes the pages of Vogue throughout the 1920s. It is assumed that the reader, with the magazines help, can learn to appreciate the challenges of modern art, and she is encouraged to do so. The unnamed correspondent responsible for the society feature `How One Lives from Day to Day shared this encouraging anecdote with her readers in 1926: I was involved in a conversation on philistines, of whose circle I was so lately one; perhaps in a way I still am, but at all events I am not one who

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THE AVANT GARDE AND BRITISH VOGUE, 19209 . 39

thinks that modern painting, writing or music either funny, disgusting or mad. I at least have begun to find the pictures beautiful, and that, according to Keats, is all I like to know or need to know on earth. Even to hate modern art sufficiently, according to the contemporaries is something gained; it is not apathy or indifference, and this leads to another theory of theirs that only what is ordinary and humdrum is insane (Late April 1926, 46). The columnists confessional tonean admission of naivete overcomebinds fashion and modernist art to the cultural processes of initiation and acquisition; she represents the fulfilled potential of the reader as cultured consumer. That modernist writing and art should be difficult to consume has long been an accepted critical proposition, one echoed in the language of the journalists contributing to Vogue. An appreciation of modern art is an acquired taste; similarly, the underlying premise of the magazines editorial content suggests that with careful study a chic appearance and cultural savvy will come `naturally: `if you absorb Vogue regularly, issue by issue . . . you gradually become imbued with the Vogue idea and unconsciously you grow wise . . . (Vogue, Late October 1923, 73). Beauty and modern art emerge as equally unnatural or, rather, equally constructed and carefully cultivated. Both artist and reader are revealed as equally reliant upon formal experimentation and innovation, be it shingled hair or free verse, to court public interest and favour. It is, therefore, fitting to note that Vogues literary reviews and editorial features throughout the 1920s privilege stylistic innovation and formal experimentation as the touchstones of modern literature. Furthermore, the fashions of this period incorporated, for example, the patterns of cubism, while illustrations accompanying reports on the latest fashion news from Paris were deeply indebted to contemporary artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Amadeo Modigliani. This very real confluence between fashion and art was not simply a meeting in the rhetoric of Vogue but was evident elsewhere in both literature and other magazines.2 The editorial copy accompanying the table of contents in the Early April 1925 issue is particularly fascinating in this regard: Vogue has no intention of confining its pages to hats and frocks. In literature, the drama, art and architecture, the same spirit of change is seen at work, and to the intelligent observer the interplay of suggestion and influence between all these things is one of the fascinations of the study of the contemporary world (Vogue , Early April 1925, xiv). The passage both trivializes fashion`no intention of confining its pages to merely hats and frocksand claims art is fashion. The boundaries between high culture and fashion are then far from impenetrable; the magazine treats

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2 The Queen: The Ladys Newspaper and Court Chronicle , Britannia and Eve and Harpers Bazar [sic] are examples of other womens magazines from the 1920s that similarly incorporated modernist currents in their reviews and articles in addition to cataloguing the dynamic interplay between art and fashion. For examples of literary material fusing fashion and art, see Michael Arlens The Green Hat (1924), Katherine Mansfields `Marriage a la mode in The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) and Aldous Huxleys Point Counter Point (1928).

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fashion and culture as equally worthy of serious and sustained consideration while claiming implicitly that art, like fashion, is fun, spirited and fascinating. Fashion is celebrated as a subject infused with the same spirit of innovation as the contemporary arts and, as such, it claims legitimacy as a focus of attention and study. The reader is openly implicated in this activity, and Vogue emerges as both a collection of dress tips and a complex confluence of cultural signs. This designation is particularly deserved between 1922 and 1926, the years during which Vogue was edited by Dorothy Todd, when the avant garde was routinely juxtaposed with the world of feminine fashion. While admittedly editing a fashion magazine, Dorothy Todd wanted to create a publication that would also be a stimulating guide to the arts in general. During the Todd years, Vogue regularly featured articles by Clive Bell reporting on the Paris exhibitions and the merits of Brancusi, editorials from Aldous Huxley and essays by Viriginia Woolf, the photography of Man Ray and Le Corbusier. The magazines flamboyant combination of high fashion and high art made for a sophisticated and lively production.3 In asserting that an exploration of the presentation of modern literature in a womens magazine can challenge our sense of the location of non-literary periodicals in the cultural politics of high modernism, the editorial content of Vogue from the 1920s offers numerous possibilities for analysis. Over the past decade, literary and cultural studies have revealed the importance and value of re-assessing modernism with reference to its convergences and intersections with mass or popular culture. Works by writers such as Andreas Huyssen (1987) and Tania Modleski (1986), and Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid (1996) have suggested the rich possibilities in interrogating the positioning of modernist texts within the discourse of popular and mass culture; one such possibility involves reading a sample of the literary criticism that appeared in Vogue during the mid-1920s.

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3 For other recent studies of Vogue and, in particular, Virginia Woolf, see Luckhurst 1997, Garrity 1999 and Garrity 2000.

ichard Aldington, principal book reviewer for the magazine throughout the 1920s, contributed four essays during the mid-1920s. The first, an introduction to the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot, which ran with the byline `A Scholarly and Austere Modern Whose Classicism and Coherent Thought Is of Serious Importance to His Generation, addressed the importance and role of influence in the development of the literary arts. In assessing Eliots literary value, Aldington argued that the poets reputation was comparable to that of Mallarme s in the 1880s and, `though not known to the crowd, he is incessantly discussed by those `genuinely interested in

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THE AVANT GARDE AND BRITISH VOGUE, 19209 . 41

4 The most recent version of this essay appears in Rainey 1998.

modern literature and thought . . . his originality and intensity of thought and emotion will only be denied by those who have not brains enough to understand (Early April 1925, 71). Aldington was not exclusively interested in supplying his readers with the means of decoding Eliots art. His primary project was the demonstration of Eliots centrality to the most important developments in contemporary literature and criticism. Aldington was particularly intrigued by Eliots ties to past literary movements and his increasingly canonical status; the question of his links with the past are of especial interest when mentioned in conjunction with works such as Edmund Wilsons Axels Castle (1931), a book that likened modernism to a second flood of romanticism by way of French symbolism and naturalism. Written as an introductory work for readers unfamiliar with the field, Axels Castle contributed to the processes of familiarization and concomitant popularization of the canonical texts of modernism. Like Aldington, Wilson was compelled to comment on the scope of Eliots influence and observed that his essays `have not only had the effect of discrediting the academic cliche s of the text-books, but are even by way of establishing in the minds of the generation now in college a new set of literary cliche s (Wilson 1931:116). Wilsons commentary reminds us that the institutional force of Eliots work was of importance from the outset. Lawrence Raineys 1989 essay `The Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land provides an excellent discussion of the poems publication history and its centrality to the institutionally sanctioned development of modernism.4 The poem was deemed important for its representative qualities even before it was published and, perhaps, more interestingly, even before it was read: many of the publishers vying for the right to publish the poem had not read it. Similarly, when Aldington concludes his essay by remarking that readers can only neglect Eliots work at their peril, the reader is left with the impression that it is not so much important that she understand The Waste Land as understand that The Waste Land is important. An observation very much in keeping with Eliots own conviction that the question of where to publish The Waste Land was an important one in that it would influence, if not determine, the subsequent reception of the poem. Explored from this perspective, Aldingtons Vogue essay is but one (early) moment in a longstanding tradition of generous praise for Eliots work and assertion of his importance as a poet and critic. While this essay differs from rather more highbrow promotions of Eliot in that it is addressed to a nonspecialist (or general) reader, the language and substantive context of Aldingtons article differs little from positive commentaries that appeared in, for example, the Weekly Westminster; furthermore, and importantly, it does not echo the critical reservations expressed in the reviews of The Waste Land that ran in the Times Literary Supplement and Nation and

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5 Humbert Wolfe, a regular Vogue book reviewer throughout the 1920s, reviewed The Waste Land for the Weekly Westminster in which he argued: `Part of the truth about poetry is its beautiful and essential unintelligibilit y, just as obscurity is its most fatal defect. Unintelligibilit y, in my use of the word here, conveys the rushing sense of suggestion hiding behind the actual written word that almost stuns the receptive mind (Wolfe 1923); in Wolfes estimation The Waste Land was stunning in the above sense. Clive Bell wrote the aforementioned TLS review (22 September 1923, 7723); the Nation and Athenaeum review (20 September 1923, 616) was written by Edgell Rickword. 6 Aldingtons series was likely incomplete on account of Dorothy Todds dismissal in September 1926, at which point the percentage of highbrow material included in the magazine decreased. After 1926, the reviews continued to consider highbrow material, but article on such subjects were now less common. It is worth noting that under Todds editorship Vogue experienced financial difficulties; circulation decreased and the magazine began to lose allimportant advertising accounts, its primary source of revenue. It was assumed that

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Athenaeum, publications we might well have assumed would have reviewed Eliot favourably.5 Although Vogue would not have been the first choice of the reader looking for sustained literary and cultural commentary, the magazine arguably sought a double readershipthe readers of fashion magazines and readers of Aldous Huxley, Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolfin aligning itself with Englands social elite and the avant garde. In courting such a readership, and in keeping with the magazines instructional impetus and emphasis on style, there was room for articles and reviews that mapped contemporary literary currents and stylistic conventions, not unlike the material appearing in more `serious settings. In many instances, the work of the Vogue contributors themselves appeared in a wide range of periodicals; Aldington, for example, in addition to being named assistant editor of the Criterion in 1922, also wrote regularly for the Sphere, Times Literary Supplement, Pall Mall Gazette, Athenaeum, Spectator, English Review, Poetry and Coterie. In the Late September 1925 issue, Aldington contributed what was to have been the first in a series of four articles dealing with English free verse. As Wilson would do six years later in the already mentioned Axels Castle, Aldington rooted the development of free verse in the writings of the French symbolists, a history that, he argued, was little understood in England due to what he describes as a deliberate ignoring of developments in French poetry. He believed that this oversight must be redressed if the then emerging body of English-language free verse was to be lucidly and effectively surveyed. According to Aldington, such a survey would need to begin with the works of T. E. Hulme, Desmond Fitzgerald and F. S. Flint and include writers such as D. H. Lawrence, the Sitwells, Nancy Cunard, H.D., Marianne Moore, J. G. Fletcher, Wallace Stevens and Mina Loy. The second article in the series, which appeared three months later, continued to emphasize the disparate and far-flung origins of free verse and its ever-increasing influences and collisions. Aldington set out `to show that there were poets fumbling along the new ways before 1910, and to demonstrate the movements decidedly international spirit (Early December 1925, 71). He emphasized Ezra Pounds American-ness, Hulmes importance as the translator of Henri Bergson, Flints deep interest in French poetry, the highly international contributors list of the 1914 free verse anthology and the formative importance of the Imagist anthologies and little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic as sites of publication for free verse. Unfortunately, Aldingtons series was discontinued after his piece in the Late March 1926 issue on Lawrence, and readers did not benefit from his intention to `devote the reminder of [the] space to separate authors, considering their poetry rather as a thing in itself than as part of a ``movement (130).6

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dith Sitwells Vogue contributions explore similar territory. Her criticism is, however, decidely less hectoring and less overtly pedagogic. Furthermore, her essays are explicitly engaged in an analysis of contemporary literature and the female writer as opposed to the broad delineation of the genesis of an artistic movement. Sitwell first appeared in Vogue when her family was nominated to the `Hall of Fame, a fortnightly feature that introduced readers to `all the most significant personalities of the day, be they poets, scientists, reformers, artists or philosophers, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud or Mr and Mrs Keynes. The three Sitwells were nominated: Because they have created a new style in prose, poetry and decoration: because of their intense interest in all the arts . . . because Miss Edith Sitwell edited `Wheels and has just published a new poem, `The Sleeping Beauty . . . because of their witty production of `Facade at the Aeolian Hall last year: because they have been caricatured by Max Beerbohm: because they are serious artists who know how to be amusing: because they are such admirable hosts and have such an interesting collection of pictures (Late May 1924, 49). Between 1924 and 1925, Edith Sitwell wrote three pieces of literary criticism for Vogue discussing notable female novelists and poets. The first essay, `Three Women WritersNotes on the Work of Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, and Gertrude Stein, tackles questions of style and influence while offering an assessment of the relative importance of the three writers to contemporary writing. Mansfield is deemed `exquisite, flawless, narrow, sweet, poignant, and contained by own her limitations; she is not help up as a writer of influence but a writer who has been influenced, namely by Anton Chekhov. Richardson, though `heavy, rather lifeless in style, is declared `important inasmuch as [she] casts undoubted influence over the work of her period. Stein, in contrast, is `infinitely the most important . . . Miss Stein is among the most important writers of her time . . . she is [not] always among the best, but she is undoubtedly among the most stimulating (Early October 1924, 81). Sitwell defends her assessment through a series of comparative analyses that pit the writers against each other with the intention of demonstrating Steins irreducible importance as a stylist. The terms in which Sitwell valorizes or dismisses these artists are an example of the paradox that has long plagued the female modernist: if she did not experiment with form, she ran the risk of not being readily identified with the modernist movement. While Mansfield is said to use words beautifully, Sitwell, nevertheless, complains that she does not unsettle language. She similarly argues that Mansfield innovatively explores sensation

Todds highbrow tastes were, in part, responsible for the financial downturn. Conde Nast had wanted to publish a magazine that exploited the connections between fashion and art, not the other way round; avant-garde tastes were simply meant to heighten the aura of exclusivity as opposed to dominating the editorial content. See also Yoxall 1966 and Luckhurst 1998.

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as bound to spiritual states, but will not offer any praise for her craft as a storyteller and thematic innovations, for her ability to move beyond clever description and capture what is bewildering, unfamiliar and difficult in the everyday. Richardsons words are rejected as lifeless and viewed as little but a means to an end, on account of her inability to select, a power that distinguishes the great artist. Richardson leaves out nothing and, as a consequence, is `seldom irradiated and never luminous (81). On turning to Stein, Sitwell suggests that ordinary methods of criticism cannot be applied readily: Either one understands it (after an infinity of groping in the dark) or one doesnt . . . Miss Stein is a writers writer. She will doubtless have great influence, but I hope that influence will be over experienced writers, and not over the very young if they are also silly. We dont want this sort of thing done badly (81).7 Stein is presented as breaking the imagined limitations of the literary arts. Sitwell has set out to convince her readers that, where Richardson gives us the known and `Miss Mansfield gives us the thing we have known but have hidden for fear it should be spoiled . . . Miss Stein has given us the unknownnew life struggling into being from dead stores (81). Six months later Sitwell tackles womens poetry in `Some Observations on Womens PoetryA Defence of the Theory That Male Technique Is Entirely Unsuitable to the Poetry of Women, an essay that takes up the question of the relationship between gender and technique. This question was also considered in an anonymous article from 1922, `The Feminine in Art, wherein a critic ventured that there was `something that can be described as typically feminine art. The question is: What? (Vogue, Early March 1922, 56).8 The critic takes `what as a destabilizing of artistic vision, and female artists are discussed as re-seeing or reinterpreting what men had been painting for centuries. Ethel Sandss 1922 show at the Goupil Gallery in London is described as a collection of still lives with `queer attitudes, in which objects are caught in unlikely relationships with their surroundings and upset accepted notions of a (visual) hierarchy. These tentative critical forays into the analysis of a womans artistic signature are aligned with the expanding body of women associated with the project of modern art and an overturning of the historical location of women as the observed subject of art, a convention that would be further unsettled in the literary arts with the later publication of works such as Marianne Moores Observations (1924) and Gertrude Steins prose sketches in Portraits and Prayers (1934). The female artists vision of modernity recalls, or parallels, the tension between the perceived self and the perceiving self that threads into the tension between instinct and imitation found within Vogue itself. The magazine schools readers in decoding both themselvesor

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7 Three years earlier Richard Aldington made a similar comment with reference to James Joyce and Ulysses in an article, `The Influence of James Joyce, that appeared in the English Review (April 1921) in which, after asserting that Ulysses was a remarkable achievement, he expressed his fear that it was `dangerous reading for anyone whose style is unformed (341). 8 The 1922 article `The Feminine in Art may well have been the work of Dorothy Todd who wrote anonymous pieces for the magazine, particularly at the beginning of her editorship.

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their personal signatureand their culture. The work of self-construction is repeatedly revealed in the female (literary) reflection, whether it be Beryl sitting at her vanity in the Katherine Mansfield short story `Prelude (1920), Mabel Warings concerns about her yellow frock in Virginia Woolfs mid1920s sketch `The New Dress, or Sasha Jensens glimpses of herself in plateglass windows as she wanders through Paris in Jean Rhyss Good Morning, Midnight (1939). 9 However, to make these observations is to wander away from Sitwells `Observations on Womens Poetry in which she suggests that female poets need different subjects and techniques to men. She proposes that `most of the rules for women poets begin with ``Dont or an ``Avoid. ``Avoid metaphysics. `Dont be pompous. ``Avoid the sonnet form, and, when possible, long lines. For poetry is largely an affair of muscle (Early March 1925, 59). Christina Rossetti is praised for having found a technique suitable to feminine muscles whereas Elizabeth Barrett Browning is chastised for having used that of a man and stumbling towards failure. Barrett Browning reputedly writes without the elegance and strange fantastic beauty that Sitwell deems essential to womens poetrya poetry that must avoid sentimentality, goodness and passionwhereas Rossettis `Goblin Market (1862) is the perfect poem written by a woman. How different is this exquisite technique, the swan-like floating movement of the grave part, and the prettiness and childishness, . . . from the clod-hopping, hearty tweed-clad manner of certain modern women verse writers, tumbling over everything they see, in their would-be mannishness (86). Sitwells third piece returned to Gertrude Stein and her status as a literary pioneer. As in the previous article, Stein is labelled a `writers writer, an artist exceedingly difficult to read but well worth the tiring work necessary in coming to understand her. She is said to be difficult because readers are unaccustomed to abstract patterns of words: `the use of words, not for sake of their philosophical content, but for sake of discourses whereby we may know more about the intrinsic atmosphere of each word, apart from its group-soul as part of a family (Early October 1925, 73). As readers are more familiar with abstract patterns in the visual arts and music, Sitwell concludes that it is impossible to give a concrete explanation of Steins work because readers and critics alike have not been sufficiently prepared or schooled for this writer. Sitwells insistence that readers have been insufficiently prepared for Stein bespeaks sympathy with the view that an appreciation of modern art is not easily cultivated without possession of the cultural competence to decode it, and decoding is an operation that presupposes or implies the deployment of an acquired strategy. Pierre Bourdieus observations on post-

9 `The New Dress was written in 1924 when Woolf was revising Mrs Dalloway (1925) for publication. Leonard Woolf published the sketch along with three other stories in A Haunted House and Other Stories (1944).

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Impressionist paintings in the introduction to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) are of interest in this context. He argues that post-Impressionist painting `is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the primacy of the mode of representation over the object of representation, signalling a shift from an art that imitates nature to an art that imitates art. Such art is not perceived with reference to the `represented or designated reality but to the universe of past and present works of art, a development that demands the emergence of a highly specific cultural competence (Bourdieu 1993:3). Steins work has become so far removed from `represented or designated reality that Sitwell is compelled to conclude: `Her work appears at first sight, almost more difficult than that of any other pioneer, and it cannot be expected that she will not have the usual struggle (Vogue, Early October 1925, 98). In drawing attention to Steins proclivity for pattern-making, weaving of connecting threads, and the parallels with music, Edith Sitwell has offered the literary equivalent of a book of fashion tips. Sitwell provides an entry point into Steins work for the reader who was until recently a `philistinethat is, prior to reading Vogueor is interested in throwing aside such vestiges. Sitwells essays tangibly mark the intersection between the literary and the non-literary or, to borrow further from Bourdieu, the intersection between `cultural capital and `commercial capital. The intersection suggests the need for further consideration of the location of the popular press in the construction of our received and now challenged constructions of high modernism. As Bourdieu comments, `symbolic production is a complex interplay of the `circular relations of reciprocal recognitions; in turn, the `reciprocal recognitions found in Vogue point to but one means by which the audience for modernism was expanded and consolidated (Bourdieu 1993:78, 116).

n returning to the pages of the eras pre-eminent fashion and lifestyle magazine, it is possible to examine how a particular readershiptypically aspirational and upper middle classwas introduced to what was originally a `restricted or minority culture. The perceived `restricted appeal of modernism and modernists, as well as the movements palpable concern with modernity, became the very means by which it entered the literary and cultural mainstream. The prestige and exclusivity of modernism was conflated with the restricted patterns of consumption and personal adornment catalogued and celebrated by the magazine. Vogue and its disparate yet fascinating collection of contributorsnot to mention the `Hall of Fame nomineessuggest the rich possibility inherent in grappling with the

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emergence of modernist literature as a mainstream `fashion accessory during the 1920s.

Bibliography
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Milne, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randall Johnson, Cambridge: Polity Press. Chase, Edna Woolman (1954), Always in Vogue, London: Victor Gollancz. DiBattista, Maria and Lucy McDiarmid (eds) (1996), High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 18891939, New York: Oxford University Press. Garrity, Jane (1999), `Selling Culture to the ``Civilised: Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity, Modernism/Modernity 6/2: 2958. (2000), `Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry, and 1920s British Vogue, in Pamela Caughie (ed.), Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , New York: Garland Press. Huyssen, Andreas (1987), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Luckhurst, Nicola (1997), `Vogue . . . is going to take up Mrs Woolf . . . to boom her, in Virginia Woolf and the Arts, New York: PACE University Press. (1998), Bloomsbury in `Vogue, London: Cecil Woolf. Mansfield, Katherine (1920), Bliss and Other Stories, London: Constable. Modleski, Tania (1986), `Femininity as Mas[s]querade: a feminist approach to mass culture, in High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film , Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moore, Marianne (1924), Observations , New York: Dial Press. Rainey, Lawrence (1989), `The Price of Modernism: Reconsidering the Publication of The Waste Land, Critical Quarterly 31 (winter), 2147. (1998), Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press. Rhys, Jean (1939), Good Morning, Midnight, London: Constable. Seebohm, Caroline (1982), The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Conde Nast, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Stein, Gertrude (1934), Portraits and Prayers, New York: Random House. Wilson, Edmund (1931), Axels Castle, London: Charles Scribners Sons. Wolfe, Humbert (1923), `Waste Land and Waste Paper, Weekly Westminster , 17 November, p. 94. Woolf, Virginia (1973), Mrs Dalloways Party, ed. Stella McNichol, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Yoxall, H. W. (1966), A Fashion of Life, London: Heinemann.

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