ABSTRACT
As the 1920s drew to a close, Swedish fashion magazines reported that the masculine garçonne style was now going out of fashion, leaving room instead for the return of femininity. Tracing efforts in these magazines to define more clearly the boundaries between masculinity and femininity, this chapter explores the issues and debates that preceded the declaration of la garçonne’s demise. By studying different but related strategies to “moderate” the masculine tendencies of the modern woman, the analysis shows how fashion advice often evolved into far-reaching and complicated discussions regarding the meaning of norms, gender and modernity. On the one hand, fashion advisors admonished women to carefully cultivate and monitor their feminine qualities, such as modesty and grace, but, at the same time, they also celebrated the free-spirited independence and physical agency of modern womanhood, associated in turn with masculine fashions, sportswear and short hair. This chapter argues that the efforts in the 1920s to control the boundaries and meanings of “femininity” were both driven and disturbed by rising difficulties to establish what it was that these boundaries were supposed to contain in the first place.
