"No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires"
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Gerould doesn’t just skewer fashion; she exposes its true patron saint: money disciplined into a certain kind of body. The line is built like a neat syllogism and lands like a slap. By pairing “lean purse” with “fat woman,” she yokes two different kinds of exclusion - economic and bodily - then shows how the industry pretends neither exists. Fashion, in her telling, isn’t neutral taste drifting through society; it’s a system engineered for a customer who can afford novelty and who already matches the silhouette that photographs, sells, and flatters best.
“Thin millionaires” is the dagger. Not “women,” not even “rich women” - just a class of people whose wealth buys both clothes and the conditions that make those clothes look “right”: leisure, tailored fits, social access, perhaps even the ability to treat the body as a project. The phrase also hints at the industry’s aspirational cruelty. Most consumers are invited to chase an ideal that was never meant for them, to purchase entry into a world that will still judge their shape and spending power.
Context matters: Gerould writes from an early 20th-century America where mass production, department stores, and women’s magazines are industrializing desire. Slenderness is becoming a modern status signal, tightened by new visual culture and new moral language around self-control. Her intent is not quaint moralizing; it’s an indictment of how taste gets manufactured to reward those already closest to the center - and to charge everyone else admission to stand outside the velvet rope.
“Thin millionaires” is the dagger. Not “women,” not even “rich women” - just a class of people whose wealth buys both clothes and the conditions that make those clothes look “right”: leisure, tailored fits, social access, perhaps even the ability to treat the body as a project. The phrase also hints at the industry’s aspirational cruelty. Most consumers are invited to chase an ideal that was never meant for them, to purchase entry into a world that will still judge their shape and spending power.
Context matters: Gerould writes from an early 20th-century America where mass production, department stores, and women’s magazines are industrializing desire. Slenderness is becoming a modern status signal, tightened by new visual culture and new moral language around self-control. Her intent is not quaint moralizing; it’s an indictment of how taste gets manufactured to reward those already closest to the center - and to charge everyone else admission to stand outside the velvet rope.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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