When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture Book

Very interesting study on the relatively brief period of time in the late 19th and early 20th century when Broadway provided a major showcase for contemporary fashion. In the first chapter, if you took out the words "Broadway" or "stage" and substituted "cinema," the chapter would read just the same as a lot of studies of early cinema and the social anxiety caused by changing audience demographics in a changing society and its relation to other new consumer phenomena such as department stores. Since I approached this book with an interest more in film than in the stage, relevant issues were the plays that were frequently turned into films (many now lost), and the way that in the late 1910s and 1920s film took over from Broadway the role of disseminating fashion information. Nice pictures, too!