The corset and the mirror. Fashion and domesticity in Swedish advertisements and fashion magazines, 1870–1914

Abstract

The article discusses two elusive components in the construction of bourgeois and middle class femininity in Sweden, 1870–1914: the corset and the mirror. Two popular genres of images are contrasted: images of corsets in Swedish fashion advertisements, and images of corsets and undergarments in Swedish fashion magazines. While fashion advertisements in general copied fashion magazine images, they chose a different path in regard of the corset and the mirror. The two objects, albeit important parts of the period’s fashion, are made invisible in fashion magazines while clearly visualized in the advertisements. The purpose of Swedish fashion magazines was not only to present the latest fashion, but also to construct a conception of timeless womanhood well integrated into the predominant ideology of domesticity. Vanity, gossip, and erotic desires were staple goods of traditional misogyny and were hardly possible to express in fashion magazines. Advertising on the other hand communicated with the female consumer as an individual and presented her as a vain, sexual and emotional creature–without condemning her at the same time. Fashion advertisements emancipated, clearly not woman, but fashion itself, from the morals of domesticity.