MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper analyses the cultural, aesthetic and identity negotiations in reshaping the desired image of Romanian women in the 1930s. It follows women’s movement between two seemingly-opposite points, both engaged in educating and presenting particular manifestations of femininity. One is Hollywood, an embodiment of glamour, modernity and endless possibilities of creative visual expression. The other is the Rockefeller Foundation, engaged in a mission of medical - and eugenic - modernization in shaping hygienic and healthy beauty through academic and medical means. I term 1930s Romanian women as ‘new women’ in contrast with the ‘modern girls’ of the 1920s, adding political and ideological undertones to national and global gender discourse. This paper uses an interdisciplinary methodology stemming from fashion studies as part of cultural studies, using semiotics and discourse analysis to read written and visual texts. I will use relevant interwar Romanian glossy and general periodicals, books, postcards, photographs and personal notes adding to Rockefeller diaries, reports and fellowship cards. The aim is to highlight the complex nature of both US influence in non-Western spaces and its translation and adaptation in interwar Romania. This paper thus brings a largely unexplored subject and space to fashion studies.