ABSTRACT
For teenage girls in the postwar era, few publications were as influential as Seventeen. Each month, its glossy photo spreads and advertisements offered young women a model for how to shop, dress, date, and behave. Since its founding in 1944, a network of adults-editorial staff, advertising agencies, and promotional advisors-contributed to developing its image, eventually producing a cohesive visual style that would not only become a hallmark of the publication’s postwar years but would also help define the era’s understanding of youth. An advertisement for the department store Famous-Barr, which appears in a 1949 issue of the magazine, seems at first to be an uncomplicated reinforcement of this carefully crafted ideal: two teenaged girls converse as they sit around a camp fire, each wearing a different, brightly colored cardigan in order to announce the store’s new line of “Bunny Lamb” wool sweaters. Chaste, restrained, and demurely dressed, the girls exude parent-approved respectability.
