Where no Woman has Gone Before: Femininity, Fashion Photography, and the Race for Space

Abstract

With the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the Cold War “race for space” officially began, and in the United States discussions arose concerning women’s role in helping meet the increased need for specialists in science and technology, including whether or not they should be trained as astronauts. These debates often revolved around femininity, a construct that at the time was rarely associated with scientific or technological intellect. Cold War anxiety over American femininity also manifested in visual culture. In this article, I focus specifically on fashion layouts from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar featuring photographs by Richard Avedon, William Klein, and Bruce Davidson, arguing that in the early 1960s, space age apparatus and motifs were juxtaposed with ultra-feminine fashion models, which was symptomatic of how the possibility of women’s involvement with space exploration was being channeled into the socially sanctioned realm of feminine consumption.

Keywords:

• fashion photography
• space race
• femininity
• Richard Avedon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Historian Stephanie M. Amerian (2016) refers to Khrushchev’s efforts as a means toward closing the “fashion gap” between the two nations that had developed by the late 1950s.

2 Arnold and Avedon had both studied under famed photographer and Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch in his Design Laboratory (Pomper 2009; Livingston 1992, 350).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Vettel-Becker

Patricia Vettel-Becker is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art at Montana State University Billings. Her research areas of specialization include American art and culture, gender studies, modern and contemporary art, critical theory, and the history of photography and film. She is the author of Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity and Postwar America (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and has published articles in such journals as American Art, Art Journal, Genders, Men & Masculinities, American Studies, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies.