ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates, the ways in which the fashion and advertising components of The Ladies' Field represented a combination of traditional and novel journalistic techniques, class and gender signification and consumer culture. It examines the ways in which feminine space was explored and femininity defined variously, in the correspondence columns and editorials, in terms of intimacy, class ideology, the rhetoric of 'expertise', consumption and social ritual. The chapter interrogates the different images of femininity negotiated in the magazine. It argues that The Ladies' Field was the site at which all of these images were interwoven in an attempt to widen the appeal of the magazine, ensuring that it held its own and turned a profit against the fierce competition that characterized the field of women's magazines. Fashion intelligence and shopping tips were perhaps the most prominent feature of The Ladies' Field, and illustrations and commentaries on these subjects filled the columns of features such as 'Vanity's Visions'.
