Extract from “Finding Out About: Life In Britain In The 1930s”, written by Cherry Gilchrist. London, B.T.Batsford Ltd, 1984.

Amazon eBay: Think of women in the 1930s. In the absence of personal knowledge of the time, images of Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo most likely shape your thoughts. Feisty, courageous, able to meet challenges, these determined women stamped the era with their personalities and styles. In the films of the day, these actresses epitomized class in films such as Jezabel and Easy Street, reigned over royal spectacles in Queen Christina and Mary of Scotland, oozed exoticism in Mata Hari and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, and made their way in the business world in Skyscraper Souls and Big Business Girl. Film has made it possible for us to glimpse into the culture of the 1930s—as seen through the eyes of Hollywood. Even more interestingly, argues Sarah Berry in her first scholarly book, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood, these pictures offer us a bridge into the lives of women in the 1930s. Classic theories of the dynamics that drive women’s fashion, especially as articulated by James Laver, historian and social critic of costume, argue that the “seduction principle” motivates wealthy women’s fashion choices. Berry suggests Laver’s articulation of a single cause ignores other good reasons for haute couture’s style changes and women’s style choices. When women entered the work force, a social world not subject to the norms of home and “society,” they were faced with questions of selfpresentation and performance that were not answered adequately by the “seduction principle.” Influences on their choices included cues given by the setting of the workplace, surely. Further, however, women realized, through their exposure to film and their own enactment, that dress was a means by which women could cross class barriers through dressing appropriately. And Hollywood presented a wide range of style possibilities, thereby presenting role models. This brief, well-argued, thoroughly researched and supported book depicts Hollywood as a potent avenue of agency for women in a country gripped by the Depression. More than escape, Berry argues, the movies’ “use of costume to parody, invert and denaturalize social distinctions may have been a significant part of Hollywood cinema’s entertainment value, along with its demystification of specific codes of behavior, dress, and entitlement” (xxi). Through narratives that featured women able to change circumstances, film’s visual spectacle provided models of dress. Thanks to industrialization, the dresses seen on the screen could be translated quickly into ones that could be purchased in one’s home department store, no matter how small the town. Unlike the fashions of an earlier day, handmade by designers, then interpreted by means of dresses on costume dolls or patterns in publication such as Godey’s Ladies Book, making their way slowly down the economic chain, Hollywood styles were accessible to almost everyone almost as soon as they were seen on the screen.