Queering the “Modern Bride”: Lessons from Vogue

ABSTRACT This article traces the distinctive figuration of the fashionable bride in Vogue (New York) as a variant of broader discourses of the white modern woman in the interwar period. The bride in Vogue constellates multiple times, as the frequent vehicle of “tradition” in a periodical generally saturated with claims of newness. And in embodying a third temporal register—the timeless—she temporarily sidesteps the constraints that the magazine implies are created for women by the aftermath of the wedding: the marriage. In her suspension in the moment of anticipation before the wedding, she suggests an alternative to the deadening force of marriage. As she does so, she mirrors the complex temporal structure of the magazine in which she is represented. Vogue's bride demands that we examine the potentially challenging quality of a frequently trivialized and even derided feminine figure.