Marketing lifestyles: The ready-to-wear industry and the genesis of the consumer in the United States (1880‐1930)

Abstract

This article aims to make a specific contribution to the field of fashion studies through a discussion of the role of marketing in the emergence of consumer capitalism in the United States between 1880 and 1930. Specifically, the orientation of American business towards marketing and its impact on the growth of the ready-to-wear industry after the First World War are presented and discussed. This new orientation is attributed to the emergence of a new ‘consumer culture’ related to the ‘democratization’ of fashion, which actively contributed towards shaping an appropriate type of subjectivity: the fashion-conscious consumer. Rather than discussing whether marketing forged new or responded to already existing fashion trends, this article employs a genealogical approach and focuses on the process of co-emergence: under what conditions and through what kind of forces did separate developments in fashion and marketing eventually join to meet the needs of a new form of subjectivity-in-the-making?