Sensuous modernity: The linguistic construction of femininity in the fashion content of early 1920s Vogue

Abstract

This essay adopts a Critical Stylistic approach to disclose the linguistic mechanisms of creation of (counter-)ideological meaning in a specific type of gendered text, that is the female-targeted periodical Vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, it investigates the linguistic construction of femininity in the fashion content of the twenty-four issues of the magazine published in 1922. In a period characterised by the gradual emergence of new identities and roles for women, Vogue chiefly employed evocative depictions of the latest trends in clothing to convey transformative notions of womanhood and defy gender categories. A Critical Stylistic analysis of Vogue’s fashion features demonstrates that this periodical favoured alluring conceptions of female assertiveness and autonomy through the use of a sensuous language of desire and feeling, describing pleasurable, multisensory encounters with fashion and modernity. Vogue’s discursive strategies show that the magazine employed linguistic form, along with visual and verbal content, to encourage women to embrace both a confident longing for personal pleasure and self-fulfilment, and the progressive gender ideology deftly woven into a periodical where female agency, physicality and modernity were favoured rather than repressed. This essay, therefore, builds on foundational research in language and gender identity that highlights the discursive construction of gender ideologies, with a view to expanding the range of scholarly interest (generally focused on content rather than linguistic form) in women’s magazines as composite cultural products which played a fundamental role in mediating new conceptions of femininity in the interwar period.