European University of St. Petersburg

Laughing in the Face of Fashion: Fear of Subcultural Styles in Punch Magazine

Graphic social satires, which comprise cartoons or caricatures that lampoon fashionable dress, often embody fears and anxieties about groups of people and their expressed (through dress) identities. Although they deploy humour to express these prejudicial feelings, fashion cartoons can therefore be read as historical documents that embody societal fears. Xenophobia, in its broadest definition will be examined as a catalyst of fashion satire. This paper reviews a curated selection of fashion cartoons from Western urban periodicals, including Punch (London, UK, 1841-1980s), Fantasio (Paris, France, 1906-1937) and The New Yorker (New York City, USA, 1925 – present) to demonstrate how sartorial style was harnessed as an object of fear and an expression of anxieties around alterity.

Using humour theories (Critchley, 2002), subcultural theory (Hebdige, 1979), and fashion historiographical methodologies (Taylor, 2002), I examine the historical contexts and fashion styles that have given rise to particularly vitriolic social commentary in graphic satires.

.This study approaches the selected fashion graphic satires with an aim to discern the degrees of superiority, incongruity and/or relief humour that are part of their social function. These three main categories of humour (Morreall, 1987), will be used as a framework to discuss the fashion graphic satires in relation to how they address or express fears. The analysis will also rely upon the historical contextualisation of humour theories offered by Michael Billig, in his work towards establishing a social critique of humour (Billig, 2005).

 This paper works towards establishing a theory of fashion humour that uses graphic satires to interrogate humour theories and in turn strengthens understandings of fashion history and visual culture. It also seeks to invite discussion of the issues that surround the study of documents of “fear-of-the-other” and the knowledge to be derived from their critical examination.