Embodying the American Feminine Ethos: Renegotiating Romanian Women's Identity From Hollywood to Rockefeller

This contribution explores the evolving ideals of women as markers of modernity in their dialogue with the United States though women’s fashion and representation. It builds upon the double understanding of embodiment as an experience mediated by culture (Entwistle 2014) of inhabiting a physical body in relation to beauty hygiene (Turda 2013) and gender (Bucur 2002) and as clothing the body (Giorcelli and Rabinowitz 2011) suggesting fashion and modernity (Wilson, 2010). The aim is to identify and decode the mechanisms of gendered negotiations between Romania and the United States on fashionability and their larger implications. This chapter uses an interdisciplinary model for a textual and visual semiotic analysis of relevant interwar Romanian discourse. It offers a panoramic, multi-faceted and comparative perspective on how gender norms were invented, disseminated and applied through fashion advice literature (Lees-Maffei 2001). It highlights the importance of fashion in shaping women’s lives to uncover interwar Romania’s subtle social, cultural, ideological and artistic practices in relation to the United States. This contribution continues a larger research on how fashion-consuming women mirrored interwar Romanian political, social, cultural and economic realities and offers the framework for future fashion studies research on Romanian topics.