Introduction: Reclaiming the Personal and the Popular
This book is about tying up loose ends. It offers a reading of visual culture that makes new links between design and film, using an approach taken from material culture studies. It also offers insights into the Americanization of British popular culture by looking at changing representations and meanings of glamour. The book also ties up some loose ends in my own personal history. I began writing it at a moment of alienation; its inspiration came from an urge to prove just what an ‘outsider’I was, contrasted with all the perceived ‘insiders’ who surrounded me. I wanted to prove that my north-eastern English, working-class background was a major handicap and source of not belonging in the academy. I felt like an alien northerner working in the comfortable and prosperous south of England. The loose ends were going to remain exactly that – their virtue was in their marginality from the main fabric of academic debate.

However, having now worked through the project over the past two years I have reached a different understanding. Further research revealed to me just how many other white women who came from similar backgrounds to myself had made a major contribution to the understanding of popular culture. 1 This changed perception was also informed by the writings of black women working in the academy and respect for their experience, for example the Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York, bel hooks, who wrote: ‘As a black woman intellectual working overtime to call attention to feminist thinking, to issues of sexism, one who wanted to talk about the convergence of race, sex, and class, I found films to be the perfect cultural texts'(1996: 5). The divisions of insider/outsider or core/periphery became more blurred as I looked closer. I came to realize that I was passing responsibility for my self-understanding and self-perception to others, whom I then hated for taking it. As Valerie Walkerdine has argued: On one level, the idea that we are constructed in the male gaze is reassuring. We remain somehow not responsible for our actions, as thought we were mere puppets to masculinity. … It strikes me as easier to take apart a beautiful image, blame patriarchy, and yet hold on to that image (Yes, yes, I am that really) or to point to a void as its other side than to examine what else may lurk there beneath (1991: 36).

Therefore, I have reclaimed an understanding of and responsibility for my self and my inheritance, the popular and glamorous that has formed a part of me. I offer it in (I believe) a generous and positive spirit. I hope that the understanding I bring to the subject of links between Hollywood and design, informed by my own experiences, my family history, local history, research into contemporary sources plus other academics’ significant work on the subject, will prove useful as an interdisciplinary study. I see it as entirely central to the growing academic project of studying the personal and the popular, and I want to be there in the centre of it. Chris Weedon has argued:

For women active in the literary and educational institutions the task of transformation may seem overwhelming. It is important that we continue to be involved in and maintain supportive strategic links with the wider feminist movement, claiming and using the institutional power available to us but always with a view to subverting it and making resistant discourses and subject positions much more widely available (1997: 169).

This book argues that popular Hollywood film has had a major impact on the material culture of Britain from at least the 1920s until the present day. A direct link is made between the transient, two-dimensional image projected on the screen and the more permanent, threedimensional artefact. This link to Hollywood manifested itself in all areas of design and consumption – from buildings, interiors, advertising to clothing and beauty products, as well as theories of design. A new type of building – the cinema – was created to enable the public to see by film historians to label the different stages in terms of technology, production and reception. Therefore, the first chapter explores film and design from the end of the First World War until the Wall Street crash – a period that Gaylyn Studlar has termed the ‘Jazz Age’(1996: 1). Chapter 2 then examines the first decade of Classical Hollywood cinema, when sound was introduced and glamour was represented by a moderne style rather than earlier art deco, with a particular focus on the local and the global context through an investigation of design on the south coast of England (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson: 1988). Chapter 3 looks at the cinema during and just after the Second World War, the second stage of Classical Hollywood cinema. The final chapter examines Post-Classical Hollywood in relation to post-modernism and a fragmented consumer culture. Each chapter examines, in turn, film history in America and Britain; the arrival of and reactions to Hollywood film in Britain; and then associated trends in architecture and design...