Linda Przybyszewski, Associate Professor, Department of History
"Labor, Cost, and Style: Teaching the Economics of Dress and Dressmaking, 1910-1940"
This paper examines how publications taught women how to calculate the money, goods, labor, and aesthetics that went into the purchase and creation of women's clothing in the early twentieth Century in the United States. The book Textile Fabrics from 1923, for example, offered chapters on “Cost of Production,” and “Supply and Demand,” followed by “Beauty, Suitability, and Becomingness,” in order to identify transcendent principles of beauty meant to mitigate the cost of keeping up with fashion trends. This paper argues for the integration of historical aesthetic understandings into the historiographies of consumption and financial knowledge.
Linda Przybyszewski, Associate Professor of History, studies the legal and cultural history of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries. Her work examines how people have used the power and authority of the state whether in the name of race, morality, religion, or beauty. Her latest book is The Lost Art of Dress.
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