Fashion,
Consumption,
Politics
Bloomer costume, 1851
An anonymous entertainer
jitterbugging alone on stage
wearing a zoot suit costume.
Notice the extended
forefingers.
Cover, Essence
Magazine, May 1970
1939 McCal’s pattern
Suit style: High waist,
padded shoulders
Young meen in zoot suits in the 1930s
(photo from hj0912.blogspot.com)
Pachucos being arrested for violating LA County ordinance
The zoot suit has earned its reputation as an outlaw. What other
fashion item can say a riot was named for it and a government agency
declared it illegal?

Mary Rourke Los, Angeles Times. 1996. Outlaw zoot suit lives on in fashion,
folklore. The Commercial Appeal, Aug 18. http://ezproxy.middlebury.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/
docview/393699856?accountid=12447.
Zoot suit was:

Emblem of ethnicity

Way of negotiating an
identity

Refusal of subservience
Pachucas and Police ,1943
Marion Post Wolcott.Negro Man Entering Movie Theatre by "Colored"
Entrance. Belzoni, Mississippi, in the delta area.October 1939.
New York Primary School Children in 1942
WWII
Porpaganda
posters,
NARA.gov
Wartime
Context
In-Class Exercise

Read “Zoot-Suit Fighting
Spreads on the West
Coast,” Los Angeles Times,
10 June 1943, p. 23.

How do the article and
accompanying images
speak to Cosgrove’s
analysis in “The Zoot Suit
and Style Warfare”?
Gender, Race, and Wartime Style
“Fifth Column Fashion”
It was simultaneously the garb of the victim
and the attacker, the persecutor and the
persecuted. . . But the central opposition was
between the style of the delinquent and that
of the disinherited. To wear a zoot suit was to
risk the repressive intolerance of wartime
society and to incite the attention of the
police, the parent generation and the
uniformed members of the armed forces. For
many pachucos the zoot-suit riots were
simply hightimes in Los Angeles when
momentarily they had control of the streets,
for others it was a realization that they were
outcasts in a society than was not of their
making. （352）
Robert Weems on African-American
Women as Beauty Product Consumers
Many African Americans
continue to view
consumerism, and in fact,
conspicuous consumption, as
a means to separate
themselves from a
“degraded past.” (166)
vintage ad for various skin lightening agents
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/skin%20lightening
What about black
companies that marketed
personal care/beauty
products to black women?
Were they selling African
American women
“whiteness” or something
else entirely? (167)
http://0.tqn.com/d/inventors/1/0/j/K/
walkerad.jpg
Selling whiteness?
Madam Walker
Beauty ad, Library
of Congress
Weems writes that “most of the
racially derogatory hair
straightening ads . . . were
produced by white-owned
companies” (169).
Image: Flickr user SA_Steve
Jheri Curl phenomenon of the
late 1970s (171)
Fashion Fair cosmetics (172)
Essence Magazine,
established 1970
by the 1990s white-owned
cosmetic and personal care
products companies had
dramatically expanded their
control of this part of the
overall African American
consumer market. (174)


Maybelline mascara ad
Maybelline Shades of You
(1991)
Estee Lauder (1991)
Estee Lauder Skin Illuminator ad
What happened to the African
American beauty entrepreneur?