Looking Flash

Disreputable Women's Dress and 'Modernity', 1870-1910

Bibliographic Data

ID4897003
AuthorsMelissa Bellanta (0000-0003-0797-7618, Australian Catholic University, corresponding author), Alana Piper (0000-0002-9369-5862, Griffith University)
Year2014
Volume78
Issue1
Pages58-81
Publication date2014-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory Workshop Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/hwj/dbt017
OpenAlexW2153114892
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited25

The cant word ‘flash’ has been used in Australia and other parts of the English-speaking world since the late eighteenth century. When it was applied to women, it referred to sexual and criminal knowledge and an interest in flamboyant clothes. This continued to be the case in the years between 1870 and 1910, the period dealt with in this article. Using Australian examples, we explore the flash street style affected by disreputable women: prostitutes, brothel madams, thieves, badly-behaved ballet girls, or young women institutionalized under industrial schools laws. We show that eclecticism was the hallmark of these women's ‘flash’ style. Their look involved clothes that were second-hand and freshly purchased, ready-made and hand-sewn, fashionable and unfashionable, relying on an array of so-called traditional and modern dress practices. In showing this, we question the preoccupation of most scholarship on women's consumption with the modern and new. Placing too much emphasis on modernity underplays the durability of older practices of consumption and gender in this period while overplaying the impact of modernizing developments on sensibilities and everyday life.

Aesthetics · Art · Clothing · Consumption (sociology) · Eclecticism · Literature · Modernity · Period (music) · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Style (visual arts) · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · History · Law

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