The Department Store Shopgirl and the Picture Palace of Consumption

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).