No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The College Shop: Making, Selling, and Buying Women's Casual Clothing, 1930–1970
Abstract
In the college shop, “gushing freshmen” drank “limitless free Cokes” and jukeboxes “play forever without nickels.” These seasonal
sections of the ever-evolving department store popped up “all over town during the last weeks of August, like mushrooms after
a rain” and disappeared with the first frost. Here, a staff of students sold—and many more bought—casual clothing. The popularity
of the shops in the 1930 s reached a fevered pitch in the 1940 s, but in a post-war shopping culture that prioritized diversity
of choice and less didactic sales tactics, retailers moved casual clothes out of a specific area and into departments throughout
the store. Women young and old followed the college woman's lead and collectively they demanded sweaters, culottes, sports
coats, tennis shoes, gored skirts, and the much-bemoaned slacks. Manufacturers and retailers stopped trying to shape or even
understand the women's choices; they just obliged. The lifecycle of the college shop gauges changes in American consumerism
over time, but it also offers a more complete understanding of clothing as a primary and enduring aspect of the human experience.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
The 1920s and 1930s were crucial decades in laying the groundwork for the shopping center as a major force in retail development during the second half of the twentieth century. The concept of the shopping center as a fully integrated business enterprise became significantly more sophisticated and ambitious. Sizable complexes were initiated that included at least several dozen businesses purveying not only routine goods and services, but a variety of more specialized ones as well. Thus cast, the shopping center became more than a place of convenience; it formed a destination-a focus of activity and a physical landmark in the fast-growing suburban landscape. Despite their pivotal role, these large community shopping centers remained few in number during the initial decades of their development. The projects that were undertaken were experimental, and hence tentative in nature. They were also highly individualistic in appearance and other physical characteristics, reflecting the vision and the taste of the developers who created them. Many were integral parts of comprehensively planned residential communities and were conceived as much to control and contain commerce as to foster it. In such ways, this first generation of large shopping centers offer conspicuous contrast with their post-World War II offspring. Their influence on later work was nonetheless crucial, for they demonstrated the advantages of meticulous planning and management in the fiercely competitive area.
Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 35.1 (2005) 39-51
The early 1960s was a time in which youth was shamelessly exploited by the mass media. Surfing was identified as a hot new sport with a youthful focus epitomising the ideal Californian lifestyle. This led to a surf craze in America and Australia. Surf music in the shape of The Beach Boys, Dick Dale and His Del-Tones, Jan and Dean, and a dance improbably named The Surfer Stomp seemed to offer a new direction for a tired and corrupt pop industry replete with manufactured pop stars named Bobby or Frankie. The Beach Boys particularly were marketed as all-American high school boys who surfed, were clean-cut, and cared only for cars, girls and fun, fun, fun. Hollywood produced up to seventy surf-related exploitation films purporting to lift the lid on just what happened on the beach when adults were not around to regulate undesirable behaviour. Out of this heady, consumerist mix emerged what many surfers regard as the definitive surf movie, Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer (1964).
The Endless Summer has a simple premise, the quest for the perfect wave, which is one of the defining myths of surf culture and representations of surfing outside the subculture. Brown follows the travels of two surfers, Robert August and Mike Hynson, around the globe in order to experience an endless summer and catch the perfect wave. To do this the friends travel to little known destinations such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Tahiti and Ghana in addition to Malibu and Hawaii. Brown explained that: "Originally we were just going to South Africa and then come back...But it turned out to be $50 cheaper to go all the way round the world, so we did that."
The Endless Summer belongs to a sub-genre of surf films Booth describes as "pure." These are surf films made by surfers for a limited surfing audience and typically exhibited at surf clubs. Brown's credentials as a surfer, a surf filmmaker and his association with significant shapers such as Dale Velzy would assure the authenticity of surf culture to its audiences. "Pure" surf films relied on the film producer distributing and exhibiting them around a "four wall" circuit. As with many four-wall producers at the time, Brown exhibited the film along with a running commentary around the usual high school halls, and clubhouses to enthusiastic surfer audiences. On the tour Brown developed a script from which he distilled the best of the jokes and script elements before recording a permanent soundtrack. In an effort to gain Hollywood studio distribution, Brown, aided by Paul Allen, toured around America to places such as Wichita, Kansas, a venue little famed for its waves, where the film ran for two weeks to full houses. However, something unexpected happened with The Endless Summer, it crossed over the border from niche to mainstream audiences when the distribution was taken up by Columbia. Indeed, such was the popularity of the film that Newsweek dubbed The Endless Summer one of the best 10 films of 1964.
So why was Endless Summer so popular? Robert August, one of the film's "stars" believes that the re-release of the film in 1966 was a reminder to Americans of a more innocent time, providing them with time out from Vietnam and the possibility to have fun for a while, "it was the right time for it" (Robert August, Surfer's Journal...