Laces and Ties: fashion, identity and gender in the Carioca illustrated press, 1900-1914

Abstract

This text analyzes the way in which a certain feminine behavior associated with a certain dress style, which is progressively adopted by a female subculture, composed of groups of women entering the labor market or in the process of professionalization, in Rio de Janeiro, from 1900 to 1914, was represented in images by journalists, mostly men. Our hypothesis is that the exposition and representation of these groups of women, seen as divergent from the bourgeois hegemonic culture by their behavior and clothing, revealed a creative device that subverted the gender markers through the manipulation of some diacritical signs, such as clothes, ornaments and public performances, which in the eyes of the male press professionals expressed a new hybrid female identity, where the feminine and the masculine seemed to be juxtaposed. The behavior and the clothes of these groups of women are metaphors of a divergent female individuality, as well as a disruptive device of the image of women as frivolous and domesticated beings, proper to the time.