From the Artist's Model to the Photographic Model

CONTAINING SEXUALITY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Today, when one uses the term "model," most people think of the fashion model. And truly, this association does make sense: the editorial fashion model has garnered the most press attention, especially since the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s. But historically, the model emerged from the artist's atelier and came of age in the interwar years, when photography transformed advertising, creating an industry demand for photographic models. In this chapter, I sketch out some of the meanings of the term "model" in the first decades of the twentieth century, charting the shift from the older, nineteenth-century artist's model to the emergence of the photographic model in the first decades of the twentieth century. The turn to photography affected the fashion industry, of course, but it also revolutionized print advertising for the consumer products that exploded onto the American scene in the prosperous 1920s, including automobiles, radios, toothpaste, refrigerators, soap, rugs, perfume, cosmetics, and pianos. With the rise of photography within advertising and fashion in the interwar years, a market developed for actors or types to appear in these commercial narratives. Within fashion, in particular, a queer photographic aesthetic pioneered by Condé Nast's first paid staff photographer, Baron Adolph de Meyer, transformed how models were represented in the pages of the new fashion magazines. Quickly thereafter, John Robert Powers founded the first modeling agency in order to represent these new cultural workers, and sell their labor to art directors and photographers, who began working with models on shoots for everything from furs to furniture. Members of the public began to encounter the new figure, the model, in the pages of the illustrated press, the cinema, and especially on the stage — a development I discuss in more detail in the following chapter. Working in dialogue with both photographers and the new modeling agencies, models played a central role in producing a commercialized zone of public discourse that linked gender, class, and racial meanings to commodity forms, and in which sexuality became inextricably linked to the marketing and sale of goods.

Artist's Models and Cloak Models: Working-Class Femininity on the Make

Before the early twentieth century, US merchants or dressmakers would display clothing on an inanimate store fixture, often made of wax, which the French called mannequins. The Americans used the term "manikin" as well (spelled in myriad ways), but throughout the nineteenth century the term referred to a model of human anatomy, such as those used in nineteenth-century natural history demonstrations. Up until World War I, with the exception of the artist's model, the term "model," in both English and French, referred not to the human being but to the material goods — the dress, coat, or corset — being sold. As with the early twentieth-century term "typewriter," which once referred to the woman who operated the machine, this new term slipped between a description of the object and the person, as new aspects of human behavior and subjectivity became organized through the market. By about 1908, the terms formerly used to describe the object — the model — migrated to the person, and trade accounts of department store merchandising, as well as the general press, began referencing "living models," which by the late second decade of the twentieth century had become simply "models."

Before the 1920s, the term "model" — when referencing a woman — connoted a number of related social types, all of which implied a form of sexuality at odds with Victorian (and Edwardian) mores. The figure most closely identified with the term in the period before World War I was the artist's model. The term "artist's model" described a woman (rarely if ever a man) who was part of the demimonde — a woman of bohemian leanings who would be willing to undress for money, and perhaps do more. Models were working-class women who began assuming the modeling stand in artists' Parisian ateliers in the 1860s; while artists and models did not necessarily pose nude to suggest immodesty, or as an erotic prelude, popular discourse constructed the artist's model as a working-class woman whose chastity was easily compromised. A sympathetic portrait of this type was immortalized in George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), in which the beautiful artist's model Trilby O'Farrell falls under the sinister spell of the musician Svengali. Another popular example was Pierrette, the poor model for Pierrot, the "hungry, discouraged artist" hero of the much-performed pantomime "Le Réveillon de Pierrette," which later served as a model for the plot for Lady Duff Gordon's 1917 fashion show/theatre piece "Fleurette's Dream at Peronne."

As these brief examples suggest, the stock character of the "artist's model" was seen as primarily a French import, in which the "artist's model" had become a figure in the public imagination with the rise of mass media and panorama literature during the 1830s and 1840s. In the US context, some representations of the artist's model allowed popular cultural representations of the lightly clad female form to avoid obscenity charges, as suggested by the popularity of early films concerning a variety of models, such as The Substitute Model (1912) and The Model's Redemption (1913). As bohemian tastes migrated to the middle class, the romanticized version of the artist's model fueled the "living pictures" of the nineteenth century through the second decade of the twentieth century and Ben Ali Haggin's extraordinary popular patriotic spectacles for the Ziegfeld Follies, discussed briefly in the following chapter. The middlebrow appreciation for the artist's model continued through the late 1920s, resulting in, for example, a series of images and texts depicting "artists and their models" in the US women's magazine Redbook.

Another important site for the development of the model as person was the European couture establishment. As Caroline Evans has shown, while European dressmakers had also displayed their new clothing models on wax or wooden dummies, the British-born, Paris-based couturier Charles Frederick Worth learned how living models could showcase the way movement animated the goods on display. Worth was a salesman for the most famous mercers of Paris, Gagelin, where young women, known as demoiselles de magasin, displayed shawls and mantles (the only ready-to-wear clothing items) for prospective buyers. These young women were proto house models, and Worth married one of them: Marie Vernet. With his wife Marie as house mannequin, Worth opened his own couture establishment in 1858, where he soon...