ABSTRACT
Glamour, romance and exoticism are prevalent themes in women’s fashion, magazines and other areas of popular culture which were engaged in and directed at women in Britain in the period from 1890 to 1914. These themes represent new experiences and pleasures which were to open up to women at the beginning of the new century. Newly expanding fashion markets were a key element in the development of a commodified femininity, which was to play such a significant part in the female experience of twentieth-century capitalism and modernity. In high fashion and the developing fashion media, an increasingly overt engagement with eroticism was part of a much wider discourse on femininity and sexuality (see Bland 1987). The images that come out of this period in relation to fashion are often highly stylized and fetishized, antithetical to the concept of functionality, but nevertheless redolent of a new sensibility in relation to female sexuality and identity.
