The University of the Arts TPS Program is currently working on a teacher’s resource guide to the arts of the Jazz Age. I was thrilled to be asked to contribute something on 1920s fashion. I found far too many wonderful images to include in the guide, so I created an album here on the Network. I hope you will check it out, and I wonder if you might help me with a challenge I have been facing. 

The Half-Century Magazine May-June 1924: Vol 16 Iss 6

We wanted to create a teachers resource guide that represented a broader view of 1920s culture. While researching fashion of the times, I kept running into the same sets of images over and over again, whether in print or online. I found this to be especially true when it came to seeking out images of African Americans in the latest looks of the ‘20s. I think this is because of three related issues:

Copyright! Items published after 1927 still under copyright. For materials published before 1927, the diligent workers at the Library haven’t necessarily caught up to the huge backlog of images that have come into the public domain. When I run into these, I do an “Ask a Librarian” request, and often the image is released. If you want to read a little more about images rights, the Library has a very helpful guide. https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/195_copr.html

Copyright can be more complex than “before 1927” Some factors make it more difficult: the Man Ray archive is still locked down, due to the estate claiming rights, for instance (the Man Ray Trust has this statement on their website: “The Man Ray Trust owns the copyrights and all other moral and intellectual rights for virtually all artwork, writings and other productions of Man Ray during his lifetime.”) The wonderful collection of James Van Der Zee photographs at the Library contains many examples that were originally photographed in the early and mid-1920s, but the prints that the Library owns are 1974 reissues, so remain under copyright. Here’s some information about the Van Der Zee archive collaboration between the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Large companies such as Conde Nast have done an excellent job of locking down their archive of images. It was surprisingly difficult to find high resolution images of magazine covers from the heyday of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair. of course, these magazines are not going to provide a diversity of representation, but the lock-down explains why these are seldomly used in online publications.

A deeper issue is what archives, libraries and museums have collected. Do a quick search on "archival silence" to learn more about the biases inherent in what was collected, how collections are maintained and cataloged. Then University of Colorado at Boulder has a good summary of the problem on their Introduction to Archival Research site.  Dominique Luster did a Tedx talk entitled Archives Have the Power to Boost Marginalized Voices which describes this issue. 

While Libraries now recognize the importance of collecting materials related to everyday life, that hasn’t always been the case. Materials related to famous figures have always been sought out, but this means that under-recognized communities are not well represented in archival, library and museum collections. Here are some resources on that history:

• https://www.nypl.org/about/locations/schomburg
• https://blogs.loc.gov/ofthepeople/2022/02/daniel-a-p-murray-a-legacy-of-collecting-black-history/
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-a-schoolteacher-spent-70-years-collecting-thousands-of-black-history-artifacts-180979602/
• https://www.aaihs.org/the-significance-of-private-collectors-in-african-american-history/

In addition to a lack of accessible collections, there is the question of what has been digitized and how. Much of the Library of Congress digitized collections related to African American history are from the Civil War era, the late 19th century and the late 1930s through the 1950s. There don’t seem to be many digital collections related to Black Americans from the 1920s at the Library of Congress. Here are the digital collections that the Library identifies as related to African American History. Have I missed some collections? Please add them in the comments.

In 2020 the Houghton Library at Harvard announced that it was halting all digitization efforts in order to focus solely on collections related to Black American history. I believe that many institutions are concentrating their digitization efforts on under-represented collections, however, this will take some time, and it is just one collection.

Sometimes, items that have been digitized are still difficult to use. For instance, the Half-Century Magazine, a general interest magazine published for an African-American audience, is available on the Internet Archive. The magazine was owned by Anthony Overton, an entrepreneur in the Black beauty and personal-care industry.  It contains a great deal of fashion advice and includes images of the latest fashions worn by Black models. However, it was digitized from microfilm, and many of the pictures are nearly unreadable. 

The Half-Century Magazine January-February 1925: Vol 18 Iss 4

Finally, some of the images of Black fashion icons use racist stereotypes. The layers of meaning and agency in these pictures are complex. While educators and librarians continue to learn how to talk about challenging imagery in a way that is not harmful, there is still a great deal of room for growth. 

When images are difficult to track down, have complicated licensing or rights issues, or aren’t available at adequate resolution, they will not get published frequently. Instead, the easy to locate, high-resolution pictures will be published again and again. 

These three factors, copyright, availability, and image quality work together to create a false canon of 1920s visual culture. It creates a set of images that are the easiest to find and use, and therefore, the easiest to research and teach. The vision they create of the era is far from complete. 

I’d like to create an album of images from the Library’s collection that is visually exciting, and has broader representation than what we usually see of 1920s fashion. The illustrations of flappers from the covers of Life magazine, and the photos of white women in evening gowns are an important part of the visual culture of this period, but leave much out. For instance, I wanted to find material about Black fashion shows, especially those in Harlem, for the UArts teacher resource guide, since so much of the focus was on the Harlem renaissance. While I did find secondary sources, as well as this amazing film from the Fox Movietone News collection at the University of South Carolina Libraries, I found almost nothing in the Library of Congress collection. Have you found images in the Library’s collection that present 1920s fashion in a more diverse way? Recommend them here, and share HOW you found them. 

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