Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
A lecture by Emma Cormack (BGC)
Depictions of department store shopgirls were common in early twentieth-century silent films in the United States. Socially and professionally, shopgirls occupied a precarious position in the world of commerce, and anxieties about these working girls played out in the era’s silent cinema. The integral role that fashion plays in films such as _Shoes_ (1916) and _Manhandled_ (1924) makes clear that what shopgirls wore—on screen and in real life—was a matrix onto which contemporary ideas about class, respectability, gender, commerce, and consumption were often overlaid. In this lecture (based on her chapter in _Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film,_ a forthcoming BGC exhibition catalogue), Cormack will screen selections from the silent period to analyze the figure of the shopgirl, whose shifting identity as worker and consumer is constructed through fashion.
Emma Cormack is associate curator for exhibitions and Study Collection curator at Bard Graduate Center. With a background in decorative arts, design history, and material culture, her research specialties include the history of fashion and textiles with a special interest in department stores, consumer culture, and print advertising in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France and the United States. At BGC, she was the cocurator of _Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen_ (2022) and coeditor of the accompanying publication; assistant curator of _French Fashion, Women, and the First World War_ (2019); and curatorial and editorial assistant for _Eileen Gray_ (2020). With Michelle Finamore, she is coeditor of BGC’s forthcoming _Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film_ (2026).
A lecture by Emma Cormack (BGC)
Depictions of department store shopgirls were common in early twentieth-century silent films in the United States. Socially and professionally, shopgirls occupied a precarious position in the world of commerce, and anxieties about these working girls played out in the era’s silent cinema. The integral role that fashion plays in films such as _Shoes_ (1916) and _Manhandled_ (1924) makes clear that what shopgirls wore—on screen and in real life—was a matrix onto which contemporary ideas about class, respectability, gender, commerce, and consumption were often overlaid. In this lecture (based on her chapter in _Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film,_ a forthcoming BGC exhibition catalogue), Cormack will screen selections from the silent period to analyze the figure of the shopgirl, whose shifting identity as worker and consumer is constructed through fashion.
Emma Cormack is associate curator for exhibitions and Study Collection curator at Bard Graduate Center. With a background in decorative arts, design history, and material culture, her research specialties include the history of fashion and textiles with a special interest in department stores, consumer culture, and print advertising in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France and the United States. At BGC, she was the cocurator of _Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen_ (2022) and coeditor of the accompanying publication; assistant curator of _French Fashion, Women, and the First World War_ (2019); and curatorial and editorial assistant for _Eileen Gray_ (2020). With Michelle Finamore, she is coeditor of BGC’s forthcoming _Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film_ (2026).
