Designing Women

Film and Culture Series

by Lucy Fischer

Grand, sensational, and exotic, Art Deco design was above all modern, exemplifying the majesty and boundless potential of a newly industrialized world. From department store window dressings to the illustrations in the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs to the glamorous pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazar , Lucy Fischer documents the ubiquity of Art Deco in mainstream consumerism and its connection to the emergence of the "New Woman" in American society. Fischer argues that Art Deco functioned as a trademark for popular notions of femininity during a time when women were widely considered to be the primary consumers in the average household, and as the tactics of advertisers as well as the content of new magazines such as Good Housekeeping and the Woman's Home Companion increasingly catered to female buyers. While reflecting the growing prestige of the modern woman, Art Deco-inspired consumerism helped shape the image of femininity that would dominate the American imagination for decades to come.

In films of the middle and late 1920s, the Art Deco aesthetic was at its most radical. Female stars such as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Myrna Loy donned sumptuous Art Deco fashions, while the directors Cecil B. DeMille, Busby Berkeley, Jacques Feyder, and Fritz Lang created cinematic worlds that were veritable Deco extravaganzas. But the style soon fell into decline, and Fischer examines the attendant taming of the female role throughout the 1930s as a growing conservatism challenged the feminist advances of an earlier generation. Progressively muted in films, the Art Deco woman―once an object of intense desire―gradually regressed toward demeaning caricatures and pantomimes of unbridled sexuality. Exploring the vision of American womanhood as it was portrayed in a large body of films and a variety of genres, from the fashionable musicals of Josephine Baker, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to the fantastic settings of Metropolis , The Wizard of Oz , and Lost Horizon , Fischer reveals America's long standing fascination with Art Deco, the movement's iconic influence on cinematic expression, and how its familiar style left an indelible mark on American culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic, Film

352 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 2003

About the author

Lucy Fischer is a Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies and directed the Film Studies Program at Pitt for three decades. Beyond teaching she has also had film curatorial experience at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Her interests in film studies are wide ranging and include international cinema of both the silent and sound era as well as narrative and experimental film.

Her particular fields include cultural and feminist studies, film theory, film aesthetics, women and film, film and literature, and the relationships between film, consciousness and desire. Aside from publishing 9 books, her articles have appeared in many journals, including: Screen, Film History, Sight and Sound, Camera Obscura, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, Women and Performance, Frauen und Film, and Film Quarterly.

Her essays have been anthologized 30 times in volumes of film history, criticism, and theory. She has lectured internationally in Israel, Switzerland, Holland, Austria, Scotland, Great Britain, Portugal, and Australia and has taught abroad in Germany, Sweden, and on the Semester at Sea program of the University of Pittsburgh (which traveled around the world). She recently completed editing an issue of the Portuguese journal, Anglo-Saxonia, and her latest book, Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m in this book group where we read only narrative nonfiction, so we tend to read a lot of stuff by journalists. I’ve been getting all snobby inside, like, "I wish we could read some academic treatments of this stuff. These journalists are all very well, but they’re so emotional, and they focus on people’s stories. Puleeze. I want to read a book by a professor, damn it! More facts!!"

And then I read "Designing Women" and was reminded gently, but at length, of the potential flaws with the academic approach: the institutional need to carve out a thin sliver of original research in a crowded field rather than write a comprehensive textbook; semiotics; the “thesis, evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence, finally, the last piece of evidence” paragraph; the stand-alone-essay/conference-paper chapters tied to each other with the occasional, semi-convincing bridging sentence. Don’t get me wrong: academic writing is still my nonfiction holy grail, but after reading this particular book, I’m ready to run screaming back into the pages of Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

“But it’s about the gender implications of the Deco ziggurat, cloche hats, lady-headed powder boxes, Fred & Ginger, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed and Oakland’s Paramount Theater,” you say. “What could be more delicious??” Well, I really wanted Fisher to knit all of these fabulous things together into a beautifully analyzed whole, but was left wondering, constantly, about The Big Picture. Did the author really spend a zillion pages on the South Seas Deco Film because it was seminal to understanding her argument, or because no other film studies profs had covered it before?

Totally yummy photos, though.

[Chuck Williamson · Rating 2 out of 5]

"What the hell? I read this whole book, and Delta Burke wasn't even mentioned once! A total RIP-OFF!"