“Cool” youth: tensions of gender norms in fashion promoted by Pop magazine (1970s)

Abstract

In the 1970s, connections between the counterculture and the feminist and gay movements resulted in tensions in traditional models of femininity and masculinity. Such behavioral changes reverberated both in the costumes of pop culture artists and everyday garments. Using images of an editorial published in 1973 by Pop, the first magazine aimed at young people in Brazil, this paper discusses from a gender perspective how the use of fashion reiterated and regulated, but also questioned and widened the limits for body-building. To this end, the discussion, which dialogues with other publications of the referred time, is based above all on the articulation between the areas of Gender Studies and Fashion History. We understand that fashion is not neutral, but a cultural practice, being produced according to particular worldviews which may reinforce or contest social inequalities. Our analysis indicates that the fashion conveyed by Pop worked to some extent as a material strategy of tensioning social conservatism, by refuting normative gender patterns and producing more libertarian models of femininity and masculinity.