The Department Store Shopgirl and the Picture Palace of Consumption

Depictions of department store shopgirls were common in early twentieth-century silent films in the United States. Socially and professionally, shopgirls occupied a precarious position in the world of commerce, and anxieties about these working girls played out in the era’s silent cinema. The integral role that fashion plays in films such as Shoes (1916) and Manhandled (1924) makes clear that what shopgirls wore—on screen and in real life—was a matrix onto which contemporary ideas about class, respectability, gender, commerce, and consumption were often overlaid. In this lecture (based on her chapter in Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film, a forthcoming BGC exhibition catalogue), Cormack will screen selections from the silent period to analyze the figure of the shopgirl, whose shifting identity as worker and consumer is constructed through fashion.