Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 45

Class Comfort—from Corset to Brassiere

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Clara Bow’s success was based on her identification - both on-screen and off
- with the working-class. While early silent film-makers had used the medium as
a political platform from which to dramatize difficulties of working-class life, pro
ducers in the Hollywood era responded to censors’ demands to soften images of
class conflict. By the 1920s, movies romanticized working-class life, implying
that upward mobility was possible for everyone. Clara Bow represented a personi
fication of this possibility. While most stars gave lavish parties in their Hollywood
mansions, she preferred to play poker with the servants in the house she shared
with her father.
Her most famous role was as the shop girl with It. In this film Clara’s charac
ter “Betty Lou” steals the heart of her handsome employer away from his debutante
fiancee and out from under the watchful eye of the debutante’s dowager mother.
Betty Lou crashes the party on the fiancee’s yacht, determined to win her man. But
she flashes her eyes and poses provocatively against the rail of the vessel to no
avail. It is only when both women fall into the bay that we begin to understand the
difference between the New Woman and her up-tight predecessor. “Betty Lou”
rescues the hapless debutante (who cannot swim) by shoving her unceremoni
ously into a life boat, and then allows herself to be saved by the handsome boy
friend. She is cool, competent and resourceful in an emergency, even calculating
in her mischievous attempt at seduction of another woman’s fiance. Her wet dress
clings attractively to an obviously unconfined, youthful body. In this scene, as in
many others, the actress displays womanly breasts and hips, suggesting the ideal
beauty of 1927 was more youthful and vigorous than prepubescent. It is her physi
cal freedom — the unrestrained movement of her natural female form — that both
epitomizes and sanitizes her sex appeal. And this physical emancipation allows
her to out-maneuver the old-fashioned society girl.
Young women who had come of age in a movie theatre looked to neither their
elders nor to the social elite for examples of dress or demeanor. That dignified
generation of women who had won the vote and impelled progressive reform had
been eclipsed in the public imagination by a celluloid shop girl. The Hollywood
era certainly provided many celluloid images of middle- and upper-class women,
such as Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson, all sexy and worthy of emulation. But
their slender elegance — enhanced by big-budget Hollywood costume designers
— was more difficult for an ordinary woman to imitate than was the perky vivac
ity of a working-class heroine like Clara Bow. A movie fan seeking to emulate
Clara’s on-screen success with men could not hope to copy those flirtatious pos
tures if she were forced to depend on the same type of foundation garment her
mother had found so essential. If a young female’s figure did not naturally corre
spond to the fashion ideal of the late 1920s, she was more likely to attempt to force
her body into shape with diet and exercise than to admit defeat and accept the