ABSTRACT
Fashion photography of this period expresses the paradoxes of the position of this new feminine, the ‘Single Girl’ as she would come to be called. Since she represented ‘movement’, her capacity to move was limited by the fact that her primary function was to signify the ideal of a period. This ideal is formulated through the publication of such popular works as Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl in 1962. Both in appearance, waif-like and adolescent, and in goals, to be glamorous and adored by men (in the plural) while economically independent, the Single Girl defines femininity outside a traditional patriarchal construction. At the same time, the Single Girl establishes consumerism as the mechanism that replaces maternity in the construction of the feminine.
