ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at various strategies for negotiating such freedom and independence in Europe, the US, and Post-Revolutionary Communist Russia. It focuses on the analysis of Art Deco fashion and considers haute couture designers such as Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, as well as illustrations in popular journals such as Vogue. The chapter also expands our understanding of femininity as a site of negotiated identities in both the middle and lower-middle classes. It argues that the most important expressions of fashion took place outside of the highbrow magazines and salons of the couturiers. The also chapter discusses women’s fashion in the newly created Communist Russia and focuses on a complex oscillation between the rejection of Western values and the return to fashionable commodities in the 1920s. Mr Boris Anrep’s mosaic conveys the fact that the changing roles of early twentieth-century women required new outward forms of representation to capture their more active roles in society.
