This original project on the labor of models, photographers, and designers in constructing American consumer culture puts together three scholarly fields that are historically loosely connected, as author Elspeth H. Brown states in the introductory chapter: queer theory, affect studies, and the history of capitalism. Although queer studies and affect studies form an interesting new area of research in fashion studies (Roberto Filippello, “Thinking Fashion Photography through Queer Affect Theory,” International Journal of Fashion Studies [2019]), their connection to the history and anthropology of capitalism creates an area on its own. Brown clearly postulates the necessity of a circular relation of the fields, not only to unveil present roles of models in shaping our world of globalized consumers but also to historicize what is already established in the understanding of consumer culture—an area in which there are still few contributions (e.g., Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger, eds., Fashioning Models: Image, Text and Industry [2012]; Regina Lee Blaszczyk, ed., Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers [2007]). The difficulties are not few, however. Queer studies and affect studies present shifting definitions; the word “queer” has held different meanings since the early twentieth century, and affect theory developed only in the late 1990s. The first meaning of “queer,” in the early 1900s, is about being strange, out of alignment. The second meaning derives from the intersectional approach, linking together race and sexuality. The third and more recent meaning is comprehensive, as it critiques all forms of stable identities.

What is the purpose of such a detailed and critical history of modeling? Modeling simultaneously involves issues of commerce, gender, race, and sexuality, which the author quite subtly ties together to offer a most innovative reading of not only the history of fashion within business history but also the other way around: how fashion and commerce contributed to produce modern consumer culture. In the words of the author, the volume interprets modeling “as a constellation of racialized, queer practices performed and communicated across shifting borders of time and place, catwalk and magazine press” (p. 13). Indeed, the display of the human body, as the author maintains, challenged the separation between market and intimacy typical of the bourgeois and industrial society. Desire both for commodities and for the models challenged the belief that consumer behavior had ever followed a rational thinking, and the affect involved in the appreciation of a fashion photograph cannot be dismissed. The assertion here is more political than psychological, as in structuring the project the author was more concerned with political economy and the trajectories of emotions between bodies than with simply stressing the emotions of individual bodies.

The project's starting point is a close examination of the paradox of a capitalist heteronormativity being shaped by queerness, understood not so much in terms of sexual acts as by a queer relation to mainstream cultural objects, images, and affects. Therefore, an analysis of production of dominant narratives of commercial feelings shaped by queer relations is really the aim of the book.

Chapter 1 outlines the multiple and contradictory origins of the modeling profession in the United States in the early twentieth century. Different female figures emerge, from the nineteenth-century artist's atelier model to the photographic model in the first decade of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the wholesale model was the new emblem of working-class femininity, liberated and independent but, possibly, sexually available. On the other hand, the society women and actresses portrayed by Baron Adolph de Meyer, the first official photographer for the American magazine Vogue in 1913, set the elite visual background of the following decades.

Chapter 2 is about both race and the stage model. With the Ziegfeld Broadway musical gaze and the construction of star Dolores as the symbol of heterosexual male desire, couture and show business merged. In 1925, though, the traveling black musical Brownskin Models also challenged racialized stereotypes: art was used to “make a claim to an elite aesthetic realm long denied black performers” (p. 100).

Chapter 3 is really the core of the book. The author bases her argument on the relationship between the emergence of glamour as a product of a queer aesthetic within a mainstream, heteronormative discourse—unpacking the work of great photographers who came after Baron de Meyer, such as Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, and George Platt Lynes, and their dissemination of a queer affective cultural production, the “queer look,” in both the United States and Europe until World War II. Noteworthy is the fact that this interwar glamour was completely white. It is only between 1945 and 1960 that the black model reemerges in the American market, and Brown devotes chapter 4 to this event with an analysis of the founding of the first black model agencies. The final chapter addresses the reconceptualization of the “natural” within feminist and race discourses. In the 1970s, black and Asian models, including Donyale Luna and Tracey Norman, questioned the idea that nonwhite models were closer to nature, to the exotic and the primitive.

The work of modeling appears in Brown's analysis for what it really is: a capitalistic culture industry in which the most important focus is selling goods and building brands, beyond any rhetoric around beauty and glamour. The relevance of sexuality in consumer capitalism emerges and is an analysis worth pursuing in further research, for example, in the European context. In studying the evolution of modeling from so many points of view—in terms of queer theory, affect theory, and the history of capitalism—Brown's research enlarges the background of both fashion studies and business history. Certainly the book meets its premises.