Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 38

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Popular Culture Review

although misinterpreted as cheap imitation of their social superiors - was unique
unto themselves. Restrictive corseting defined women like those in the cartoon as
ladies, but for working-class women (even for those who aspired to what Enstad
terms “ladyhood”) the corset was optional attire. Photographs of garment workers
bent over their sewing machines in 1909 show only one woman with the tell-tale
ridge made by a corset showing through the fabric of her shirt-waist. Imagine the
discomfort experienced by a woman who sat at a sewing machine, for instance, for
twelve hours a day with a long, steel-boned corset digging into her stomach. By
the same token, the vigorous pursuit of leisure indulged at dance halls and amuse
ment parks would have been difficult to endure in a corset. Before long, morerelaxed dress codes, formerly associated with working women, became necessary
for everyone who wished to participate fully in recreational activities.
Dance halls and cabarets provided a significant setting for racial as well as
class mingling. Slumming — an important aspect of cultural participation for so
phisticated urbanites by the 1920s — was indulged in only by the very daring in
the Teens (Erenberg xii). But it was there, in the jazz clubs of urban black ghettos,
that adventurous white youth could hear the new jazz music and witness the exu
berant movement of African American dancers. Understanding the origins of the
popular dance crazes of the early decades of the century complicates the bubbleup theory, because the fashion ideal - although inspired in this case by black bod
ies — was most assuredly white. But analysis of popular dancing provides a good
illustration of the way working-class models were refined for middle- and upperclass consumption.
Perhaps no aspect of modern culture supports the bubble-up theory of fashion
movement more than the tango craze. At the same time, understanding the origin
of the tango illustrates the means by which race as well as class contributed to the
construction of the fashionable ideal. It is here we see that the refinement of work
ing-class culture for middle-class consumption directly affected a change in the
foundation garment. Passion for dancing the tango spread from the brothels of
Argentina, through the chic cabarets of Europe, and on to the United States in the
early 1910s. Originating with African slaves and free blacks in the Spanish-Ameri
can empire in the nineteenth century, the tango retained little of its original feroc
ity by the time it shocked the Paris elite in 1913. After decades of revision in the
white working-class district of the Buenos Aires slaughterhouses, the tango had
become a dance where the partners moved in sensuous patterns together, rather
than apart as in the original A