This is a guest post by Samira Spatzek, a Kluge Fellow and a postdoctoral researcher and academic coordinator at the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Free University of Berlin, Germany.
When Princeton socialite and businessman Arthur B. Turnure ventured to publish a New York social gazette at the end of the nineteenth century, he couldn’t have known that this idea would blossom into a renowned fashion magazine that still operates internationally today. With Josephine Redding as its editor (1892-1900), the first issue of American Vogue was published on December 17, 1892. From the beginning, Vogue set out to cater to upper-class readers from New York City’s most distinguished and privileged families as well as to those aspiring to the lifestyle of this elite class.
While both scholars and the general public have shown great interest in Vogue’s overall history, little attention has been paid to the magazine’s first decade. This is unfortunate not least since Vogue, like other women’s magazines and fashion periodicals published at the turn of the twentieth century, both shaped and was shaped by a rapidly changing literary market and publishing landscape. Indeed, it would become “a fertile space for the expression of social and political philosophies,” according to Noliwe Rooks, “teaching women how to envision and navigate constructs of race, gender, nation, citizenship, and identity.”