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‘How to be in Fashion and Stay an Individual’: American Vogue, the Origins of Second Wave Feminism and Mass Culture Criticism in 1950s America

On 15 September 1955, the latest edition of US Vogue hit American news stands. The issue’s simple yet striking cover loudly proclaimed its central purpose: to showcase ‘The New Way: How to Be In Fashion and Stay an Individual’.1 Inside, articles were faithful to the premise by exploring the ‘New Suit-Individualism’ in Paris and America and profiling ‘City Smartness – International, Individual’. This editorial approach – to resolve the paradoxical impulse to both blend in with the crowd and stand out from it – was not an accident, nor was it an anomaly. It was the culmination of a broader editorial shift during the 1950s in response to midcentury American critiques of mass culture and mass society. Of course, criticism of the processes of modernisation, urbanisation and industrialisation were not unprecedented in the United States.2 But as these processes reached full maturity at mid-century, and massification proliferated, these concerns escalated and intensified. During what Michael Kammen has termed the ‘Great Debate’, numerous essays and books critiqued the growth of a homogenised, sanitised and debased culture, and articulated grave concerns for the state of American individualism and sense of self that was increasingly being strangled.3 Key in this regard was Dwight MacDonald, who – through his scathing analysis of ‘masscult’ and ‘midcult’– became America’s most widely read mass culture critic by arguing pessimistically that America’s popular culture was beyond rehabilitation or redemption.4 During the 1950s, other American intellectuals also took aim at aspects of modern American life.5 In 1950, sociologist David Riesman’s bestselling and influential monograph The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character argued that because Americans were rewarded for conforming in the modern bureaucratic age, middle-class Americans had shifted from being ‘inner-directed’ to ‘other-directed’.6 William H. Whyte Jr elaborated on this theme in his 1957 book The Organization Man, which mounted an even more strident critique of the ways in which