Rural Representations in Fashion and Television: Co-Optation and Cancellation

FSPC 1 (1) pp. 97–117 Intellect Limited 2014

Susan B. Kaiser AND SARA TATYANA BERNSTEIN University of California, Davis

Rural representations in fashion and television: Co-optation and cancellation

Abstract Keywords In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Colombia Broadcasting System (CBS), a major rural US television network, cancelled all of its popular rural programming (e.g. The television Beverly Hillbillies [Paul Henning, CBS, 1962–71], Green Acres [Jay Sommers, sitcom CBS, 1965–71]). Known as the ‘rural purge’, the cancellations made way for more fashion urban‑themed shows and strove to cater to higher ‘quality’ (presumably urban) Vogue viewers. At the same time, US Vogue Magazine featured the peasant look: a space decidedly rural style, but one co-opted from ‘other’ places and times. In this article, we analyse contradictory and ambivalent representations of ‘rurality’, which we describe as the construction and appropriation of non-urban life as a kind of cultural authenticity that is alternately disparaged and celebrated. Using Fred Davis’s (1992) concept of identity ambivalences and Henri Lefebvre’s (1991 [1974]) theories on the production of space, we explore cultural discourse in the late 1960s and early 1970s to interpret the complex rural-urban dynamics in fashion and television.

Introduction

‘Fashion: Don’t be confused; this is the look […] Your dress can be a printed peasanty dirndl.’ (Anon 1970a: 48, 55)

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‘CBS canceled every show with a tree.’ (Pat Buttram, actor who played Mr Haney on Green Acres, cited in Harkins 2004: 203)

As hegemonic systems, fashion and television share a need for popular consent in order to thrive. Yet they operate differently in their attempts to exercise their power, as the above epigraphs suggest. In the history of the United States, including fashion and television history, the late 1960s and early 1970s is a period that is particularly compelling as a time of rapid cultural change, following the civil rights, feminist and anti-war social movements. Challenges to authority were abundant, and so were dramatic attempts to impose authority. Two conflicting examples of such attempts, taken together, represent cultural ambivalence regarding ‘rurality’: a term we use here to suggest a kind of construction and appropriation of rural (non-urban) life as a sign of cultural authenticity that is alternately disparaged and celebrated. In August 1970, Vogue editors’ voices came through loud and clear in their declaration of Bill Blass’s red peasant-inspired dirndl dress in the new ‘midi’ hem length (mid-calf) as an example of the ‘right’ choice. Famously, Vogue’s dictate did not work; women roundly rejected the midi length in what has become a textbook example of consumer demand in action. Fashion designers’ co-optation of the rural-inspired European/Russian peasant concept, however, did resonate with consumers – having already been one of the looks adopted by the hippie counterculture. Six years later, Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) went further in his appropriation of Tyrolean, Romanian and Balkan peasant styles through his romantic, folkloric line described by Pierre Schneider (1976), an art/fashion critic in Vogue, as ‘farmland elegance’ (172) and as ‘over- whelmingly rural’ (235). Schneider argues that rural peasant cultures relate to nature and seasonality rather than a tempo of change, as one would find in a city. ‘Closer to the gods’ in their authenticity, Schneider (1976: 235) declares that Saint Laurent’s 106 folkloric garments are ‘good prophets […] for a new revolution: the end of modernity [and fashion]’ and a return to ‘costume’. Saint Laurent’s rural look was not ‘nostalgia for the past, but for the eternal present’ (Schneider 1976: 235). Striking in Schneider’s analysis is his blurring of time and place: Saint Laurent captures it all in an eternal present with rurality as a major theme. Notably, however, the romanticization of rurality occurs through the co-optation of styles from a timeless (presumably unchanging) elsewhere: other, non-urban places. By the spring of 1970, the institution of television had taken a very different approach to the exercise of power in relation to rurality. CBS cancelled any ‘show with a tree’ (e.g. The Beverly Hillbillies [Paul Henning, CBS, 1962–71], Green Acres [Jay Sommers, CBS, 1965–71], Petticoat Junction [Paul Henning, CBS, 1963–70], Hee Haw [John Aylesworth and Frank Peppiatt, CBS, 1969–71]) to make way for more ‘urban-centred’ or ‘progressive’ comedies (e.g. All in the Family [Norman Lear, CBS, 1971–79], M*A*S*H [Larry Gelbart, CBS, 1972–83]). Known in media circles as the ‘rural purge’ (Harkins 2004), CBS’s cancellations were in part a response to the network’s growing reputation as the ‘Country Broadcasting System’ that catered to older, rural and less affluent viewers. Here, there was no discourse about ‘farmland elegance’, godliness or an ‘eternal present’. Rather, rural programming was ridiculed as ‘country corn’ that appealed

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to the lowest denominator in US society. Rurality in the ‘here and now’, according to CBS executives, was no laughing matter, and it was certainly not romantic. Despite the ongoing popularity of rural situation comedies and the variety show Hee Haw – and their continuation as re-runs in syndicated programming – they did not represent the urban, culturally sophisti- cated image CBS strove to project. Within a few years, some dramatic rural-themed programmes emerged: Little House on the Prairie (Edwin Friendly Jr, National Broadcasting Company [NBC], 1974–83) and The Waltons (Earl Hammer Jr, CBS, 1972–81). Both of these shows, however, were safely framed in the past and were not comedic. A notable exception to the rule against rural humor- ous programming was CBS’s later show, The Dukes of Hazzard (Gy Waldron and Rod Amateau, CBS, 1979–85), set in Georgia. Overall, however, rural life was rarely represented in the world of television until the twenty-first century proliferation of reality shows such as Fox’s The Simple Life (Mary- Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray, Fox, 2003–07), The Learning Channel’s (TLC’s) Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (Howard Lee, TLC, 2013) and Music Television’s (MTV’s) Buckwild (JP Williams MTV, 2013). In 2003, CBS – in a marked change of heart from 1970 policies – attempted to create a reality show called The Real Beverly Hillbillies, featuring a poor Appalachian family living in an actual mansion in Beverly Hills. The network’s ‘hillbilly hunt’ for a family was cancelled after rounds of protestation from southern politi- cians and the Center for Rural Strategy (Simon 2003; James 2003a, 2003b; Johnson 2003; Harkins 2004). Taken together as case studies, Vogue’s embracement of peasanty, folkloric looks and CBS’s purge of country-based comedies – both in 1970 – offer possibilities for understanding how hegemony works through the production of space/place. The contrast between television’s move towards urbanity and fashion’s simultaneous appropriation of rurality ultimately breaks down; neither hegemonic move – the cancellation nor the co-optation – was ultimately able to prevail as intended with the consum- ing public. That is, women soundly rejected the midi version of the dirndl (although the peasanty concept resonated, as did long [maxi] prairie-style dresses); they were not ‘confused’ about the ‘proper’ hem length. And, by popular demand, the rural television programmes became syndicated and played for years as re-runs. Using these 1970 television and fashion case studies as a starting point, we proceed to explore their implications for understanding popular cultural representations of rural places/spaces. Both the rural sitcoms and Vogue peasant-fashion spreads of 1970 generated impact through out-of-context, ‘fish out of water’ narratives: for example, southern hillbillies in Beverly Hills, or the ironic appropriation of peasant style in a high- fashion context, respectively. We argue that they did so through different relations to time and place/space. Rurality, that is, seemed to be acceptable so long as it was framed in the past or in an exotic ‘other’ place. Both television’s and fashion’s hegemonic moves, however, relied on a rural-urban tension or dynamic, brought into specific, ironic relief through ‘fish out of water’ scenarios. Throughout the article, we interpret these scenarios and the he gemonic attempts to manage them through the combined use of Fred Davis’s (1992) concept of fashioned identity ambivalences and Henri Lefebvre’s (1991 [1974]) space theory.

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Urban-rural ambivalences In his book Fashion, Culture and Identity, Fred Davis (1992) argued that culturally coded identity ambivalences provide fashion with fuel for change. Davis focused on the unresolved (and unresolvable) tensions involved in fashion’s ongoing play with gender oppositions, class struggles and sexual dynamics. He argued that fashion’s dialectical play with cultural imagery results in ambiguous visual appropriations, juxtapositions and negotiations. The interplay between masculinity and femininity, for example, articulates struggles over cultural codes: struggles that are not on a level playing field in terms of gender dynamics. We propose that Davis’s framework can be applied to urban-rural power relations and tensions, as well. As we write this, summer fashions featured in shop windows in the United States and Europe include ‘pieces of rural’, in the form of red-and-white gingham in clothing design (see Figure 1). As Davis put it, fashion points to, but cannot resolve, ‘cultural fault lines’. Fashion – with its rich repertoire of colours, patterns, textures, shapes, and so on – is especially adept at articulating cultural ambivalences or both/and, this-and-that, dynamics, because it can place different visual elements together to create contrast, irony or ambiguity. Further, the setting of a fashion shoot, for example, can foster ironic, ‘out of place’ or ‘fish out of water’ statements (e.g. an urban-looking fashion model in a rustic or exotic context). Key, as well, to the humour of rural situational comedies such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres was the idea of being ‘out of place’ (i.e. rural in an urban setting, or vice versa). This out-of-placeness can be interpreted, from the perspective of Fred Davis’s (1992) concept of identity ambivalences, not as an either/or reversal but rather as a both/and creation of irony. Together, ambivalence (mixed emotions) and its conceptual cousin, ambiguity (mixed messages) highlight contradictions (Davis 1992). And contradictions abound in the production of space, according to philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991 [1974]), who made a distinction between ‘abstract space’ and ‘social space’. He used the latter term in ways similar to the concept of ‘place’: a space in which people live and assign meaning. Places, according to Lefebvre, are ‘marked, noted, named’ (1991 [1974]: 118). Although urban, rural and other (e.g. suburban) spaces all become social as they become invested with names and meanings, Lefebvre suggests that urban spaces are the most abstract and contradictory in nature, especially in relation to social class. That is, urbanness ‘deflects class struggles’, although it actually is an ‘arena of action’ for class struggles (386). He described the bourgeoisie, in particular, as ‘the abstract space of capitalism’ (57). Indeed, one of the first meanings of the bourgeois according to the Oxford English Dictionary (2013) was space-related: a description of a person who lived in the town, as opposed to the country. Lefebvre (1991 [1974]) viewed fashion - like sport, art and advertising - as a site of abstract space in which capitalism applies its strategies and becomes the ‘locus of all the agitations and disputations of mimesis’ (309). He indicated that a ‘glaring paradox’ about abstract space is its ability to be, simultaneously, ‘the whole set of locations where contradictions are generated, the medium in which those contradictions evolve and which they tear apart, and, lastly, the means whereby they are smothered and replaced by an appearance of consistency’ (363). Lefebvre’s discussion of abstract space and urbanity meshes well with western fashion studies’ emphasis on cities. Arguably, fashion history and theory have emphasized urbanity as a condition of fashion change, whereas

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Figure 1: This bottom of a dress conveys ‘a little bit of country’ in a shop window in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France in May 2013. The triangular, flouncy red-gingham insert offers a peek or piece of rural, juxtaposed with blue-and-white stripes and a polka-dot trim. The vivid contrast created by this juxtaposition can be seen as conveying a rural-urban mixture and, perhaps, as melding sailor (blue-and-white stripes) and country (red gingham) themes with a bit of whimsy (polka-dot trim). None of these patterns is ever really ‘out’, but combined together in this dress, featured in the heart of Provence, they create a striking look in a rather ironic and ambiguous, summery-fresh way.

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rural clothing has been characterized as ‘fixed’ or traditional dress (despite notable exceptions, such as Lou Taylor [2004], who demonstrated that European peasant dress has not been fixed or static). Western modernity’s urban bias, we submit, has influenced representations of fashion and television programming alike, as evident in the vast majority of fashion images and the ‘rural purge’. Yet as Fred Davis’s (1992) work reminds us, in some contrast to Lefebvre’s writing on abstract space and contradiction, fashion articulates contradiction (and ambivalence); it does not merely ‘smother and replace’ contradiction with ‘an appearance of consistency’ (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: 363). At the same time, Lefebvre’s connections among abstract space, urbanity and capitalism resonate not only in representations of city fashion, but also more generally in the contemporary context of global branding, transnational imagery and digital social media. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, fashion’s appropriation of European rural peasanty styles abstracted them spatially, whereas television cancellations erased rurality altogether and, in the process, in Lefebvre’s terms, attempted to ‘smother’ urban-rural contradictions. Among the contradictions that were part of cultural (and countercultural) discourse in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a search for ‘authentic’ and ‘natural’ ways of being, coupled with a desire to be modern and contemporary. The former roughly equated, albeit ambivalently, with rurality, whereas the latter was framed as urban. A text of the period that captured some of the contradictions, at least implicitly, was Charles Reich’s (1970) book, The Greening of America, discussed below.

The Greening of America The year 2010 marked the fortieth anniversary of the publication of The Greening of America. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News published an article recalling the phenomenal nature of the book’s success in 1970 (Schwartz 2010). The New Yorker had run an excerpt of nearly 70 pages in its issue on 26 September 1970, and received more correspondence from readers than it ever had before. Millions of copies of The Greening of America were sold, and the book was number one on the best-sellers list. Media response was tremendous. The book critiqued the ‘plastic’ values and materials of contemporary life – including capitalism and consumerism – yet went further optimistically to propose an emerging ray of light in the form of youth: Consciousness III. Author and Harvard University Law Professor Charles Reich indicated that Consciousness I had articulated the early history of the United States, and had embraced the self-reliance of farmers and entrepreneurs as a guiding ethos. He proposed Consciousness II as the ideology associated with urban-industrial capitalism and the conformity of the organizational society: the rise of an artificial existence removed from nature and authentic values. Consciousness III offered a kind of recovery through the ‘restoration of the non-material elements of man’s existence, the elements like the natural environment and the spiritual that were passed by in the rush of material development’ (Reich 1970: 382). Confident in the potential of the baby boom generation to enact the new consciousness, Reich highlighted evidence of the emerging cultural revolution in clothing, music, relations with nature, and even television, to the extent that ‘creative people who write and edit television shows are becoming radical’ (Reich 1970: 370). He also placed a lot of emphasis on two somewhat contradictory (hippie) aesthetics in clothing: one that was closer to nature (jeans, earthy colours, comfortable and functional clothing), gender neutral, and

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defiant of Consciousness II’s conformity (e.g. the masculine business suit); and one that was much more colourful and explored multiple ethnic and historical experiences. He characterized the latter aesthetic as ‘freedom with costume’, uncritically celebrating the act of cultural appropriation and making a distinction between countercultural and high-fashion experimentation with ‘costume’:

With the magic deftness of stage sorcery, a headband can produce an Indian, a black hat a cowboy badman. When a high fashion woman wears a costume, say a ‘matador’ suit, it seems to have been imposed on her, mask-like, by her designer. She is an object that has been decorated. But the costumes of the young are not masks, they are expressions of an inner, perhaps momentary state of mind. (Reich 1970: 254–55)

Despite its popularity, Reich’s book received mixed critical reviews. Critics described Reich as ‘politically naïve and romantic’ in his celebration of hippie culture and drug use. Other reviewers praised Reich for capturing and interpreting the counterculture’s spirit in a way that was understandable to concerned parents (Schwartz 2010). Looking back 40 years later, Reich himself admitted that the book felt like a dream or fantasy, ‘as though individuals woke up with a headache or even a hangover. But it was a cultural moment’ (Schwartz 2010). Reich reflects that he thinks the book was so popular because it offered a sense of hope: the ‘greening of America’ was not just about the environment but also the ‘blossoming of many different kinds of people, and many different kinds of cultural pursuits, many kinds of music and art and so forth’ (Schwartz 2010). Part of that blossoming, from a critical contemporary perspective on the ‘costume-y’ aesthetics included in Reich’s Consciousness III, involved the appropriation of non-white or ‘other’ cultures for the edification of (presumably white) young experimenters. Additionally, looking back from a feminist cultural studies perspective, there were limits to Reich’s analysis from the standpoint of gender and class politics. At the same time, his work does help to bring a deep cultural contradiction/ambivalence into specific relief: change was in the wind with the mainstreaming of the counterculture, as well as the civil rights, feminist, and other social movements. Most of the discourse regarding what it meant to be progressive grasped the cultural/political and economic significance of the baby boom generation (born between 1946 and 1964). Yet beyond that, there were some vexing fissures along the lines of class and place: rural versus urban. On the one hand, there was (and still is) a search for cultural authenticity. At the same time, the very roots of the history and ‘cultural authenticity’ of the United States – founded on principles of Jeffersonian democracy (itself founded on a deep contradiction with respect to slavery and race relations) and agrarian citizenship – were being expunged from cultural spaces such as television in an attempt to become more appealing to younger, urban, presumably white and affluent viewers as the imagined audience. As seen in the following two sections, a kind of rebranding was underway, and it played out differently in the worlds of television and hegemonic fashion.

The rural purge in US television: ‘Quality over quantity’ The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres were among the most popular television programmes in the 1960s. Known as ‘fish out of water’ comedies, both shows featured the ironic juxtaposition of city and country life. Transplanted

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into a wealthy neighbourhood near Hollywood’s ‘dream machine’, the rags-to-riches Clampett family continues to dress, talk, behave and hold the same values as they had when they lived in the Ozark mountains. Hilarity ensues in The Beverly Hillbillies when the Clampetts encounter a very different (less ‘authentic’, materialist) system of values and everyday life. (See Figure 2.) In almost a reversal of the Clampetts in Beverly Hills, in the Green Acres series the Douglases move from a Manhattan penthouse to a run-down farm in Hooterville (somewhere in middle America: left open to the imagina- tion). (See Figure 3.) Oliver Wendell Douglas, a successful lawyer who has always longed to be a farmer, drags his wife Lisa (who loves New York City, high fashion and shopping) to the countryside. She continues to wear her flowing gowns and contemporary fashion, but in many ways she actually adapts to country life better than he does. He too appears ‘out of place’: he wears a three-piece suit on the farm, even while driving a tractor and, despite

Figure 2: In October 1963, the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies appears in the closing credits of the show, in front of the characters’ Beverly Hills mansion. From left to right, Max Baer, Jr. plays Jethro Bodine (Jed Clampett’s [far right] nephew). His too-short trousers, gingham shirt, and tight jacket communicate his poor rural roots. Irene Ryan appears in the character of Daisy Moses (Granny), with her old-fashioned, country look: long skirt and apron, modest floral print blouse, ‘granny’ glasses, and hair pulled back in a bun. Elly May Clampett (played by Donna Douglas) wears jeans and a long-sleeved shirt; she emphasizes her waistline with a rope belt. The tattered suede, floppy-brimmed hat worn by her father, Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen), becomes iconic on the show. In the March 1970 issue of Vogue, a fashion model wears an almost identical (but un-tattered) hat by Ungaro (Anon 1970a).

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Figure 3: Green Acres characters Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) and his wife Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor) continue to wear their Manhattan clothes when they move to their run-down farm home in Hooterville. Oliver, a city lawyer, never seems to figure out that it does not make too much sense to wear a three-piece (or here, two-piece) suit when working on the farm. And Lisa wears the same kind of leisurely pink feathery dressing gown she had worn in their Manhattan apartment. Their handyman, Ed Dawson (played by Tom Lester) dons more typically rural clothing: jacket with a large plaid, a turned up cap, and so on.

his deep respect for country life and values, he never quite seems to realize that he does not fit in. To set the stage for the emergence of shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres, it is helpful to understand how television scholars have described the role of television – in contrast to rural programming – to its inextricable link to suburbanization. During the early days of television, there had been some urban programming, such as The Honeymooners (Harry Crane and Joe Bigelow, CBS, 1955–56), featuring a working-class couple and their friends living in a New York apartment complex, and I Love Lucy (Jess Oppenheimer and Madelyn Pugh-Davis, CBS, 1951–57), with a similar format but in a more upscale Manhattan apartment. Westerns were extremely popular throughout the early years of television and into the 1970s, but their format was more dramatic and less comedic than other spaces/places depicted on the small screen. However, by the 1950s, the dominant representation was the suburban, white middle-class or bourgeois nuclear family (e.g. Father Knows Best [Ed James, CBS, 1954–60], The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet [Ozzie Nelson, ABC, 1952–66]). As a medium that promised to ‘collapse

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space’, television became a kind of ‘parallel universe’ to the massive increase of suburbs, which were zoned to maintain high property values (Spigal 1992). Rural and urban families alike – especially white middle-class families – flocked to the suburbs, and television offered a self-reflexive window on the world those families inhabited. In the 1960s, there was a turn to more rural-themed programming – ironically at a time when rural populations were diminishing dramatically. Among the three major US networks, CBS was best known for such programming, in the form of both sitcoms and variety shows; both formats evolved from earlier CBS radio shows. One writer who made the successful transition from radio to television was Paul Henning, who had started his career as an actor and singer for a Kansas City radio station. Born in Independence, Missouri, Henning had gone to scout camp in the Ozark mountains in rural southern Missouri, on the Arkansas border. He fell in love with the people he met in the Ozarks and was particularly influenced by their humour; he took these memories with him to Hollywood, where he made the transition from radio to television with Burns and Allen (George Burns, CBS, 1950–58) and then wrote for The Real McCoys (Irving Pincus, American Broadcasting Company [ABC] and CBS, 1957–63), and The Bob Cummings Show (Paul Henning, NBC and CBS, 1955–59), the first show he created on his own. He had introduced hillbilly characters into Burns and Allen and The Bob Cummings Show: ‘I always loved hillbilly humour’, he said in an interview,

The only drawback, as I saw it, was the setting. I went to see ‘Tobacco Road’, and I laughed at the humor, but I deplored the setting. It was so depressing. I thought to myself, ‘If I could take a hillbilly family and put them in a lush setting, a more upbeat setting […].’ That's really what it amounted to. (Lewis 1994)

Henning created the show with Buddy Ebsen in mind to play the leading role of Jed Clampett, the patriarchal figure in the hillbilly family, who wore an old floppy hat and worn clothing, even after he became a multi-millionaire. Irene Ryan played the role of Granny; she fit the stereotypical image of older women at the time: long hair pulled back into a bun, granny glasses and a long dress covered with an apron. The Beverly Hillbillies was an instant success. Within three weeks of its debut on 26 September 1962, it shot to #1 in the Nielsen ratings. It remained in the #1 slot there or near that position for its first two seasons in Nielsen’s annual rankings of the top 25 shows, and remained in the top twenty shows throughout its nine years of running. The highest-rated half-hour television episode of all time was the one in which Granny mistook a kangaroo for a large jack rabbit (McLellan 2005). Critics were not as kind as the general viewing public in their evaluation of The Beverly Hillbillies. One critic declared, ‘If television is America’s vast wasteland, the “Hillbillies” must be Death Valley’ (Cox 1992: 81). United Press International’s Rick DuBrow wrote, ‘The series aimed low and hit its target’ (McLellan 2005: B16). Viewers themselves were more ambivalent. Podber (2008) conducted interviews with Appalachians to see how they recall shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies. One informant, Connie, recalled sometimes laughing at the characters and, then other times, wondering ‘if other people thought

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we were that way. If they did, we felt they were seeing a wrong picture of us, that this was very stereotypical […] not all our families are this way’ (Podber 2008: 47). At the same time, some informants had a strong desire to see images on television with which they could relate; they wanted some kind of representation and found some satisfaction even when the images were stereotyped. Another Appalachian woman commented that the Beverly Hillbillies were

great. I mean, because where else were you going to find these people other than around you, you know? ’Cause you really didn't. You always saw the superstars on TV but you never really saw the real people, people that lived around you. So, I really connected with them. (Podber 2008: 47)

Overall, Podber found that viewers’ own perspectives were mixed or ambivalent. There was consensus, however, regarding the desire to be included in popular culture (Podber 2008). Due to the instant, widespread popularity of The Beverly Hillbillies – across rural, suburban and urban viewers, CBS urged Henning to develop another rural sitcom, and within a year, he had created Petticoat Junction (1963–70), set at the Shady Rest Hotel in Hooterville, a fictitious tiny town in an ambiguous state (most likely to broaden the appeal of the show). Three beautiful young women (Billie Jo, Bobbie Jo and Betty Jo Bradley) in cute gingham and other country dresses lived at the hotel with their mother and their Uncle Joe. They skinny-dipped in the water tower, leaving their clothes hung over the rail – hence the name. The hotel was right next to the train track, with The Cannon Ball (the train) bringing in guests and adventures on a regular basis. The success of both Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies led the VP for Programming at CBS to offer Henning yet another half-hour time slot for a spin-off, without even needing to produce a pilot. Henning had his hands full producing and writing two sitcoms, so he enlisted Jay Sommers, who had been on his writing teams. Sommers had a show in mind – based, like The Beverly Hillbillies, on the principle of miscommunications and mayhem through the ‘fish out of water’ concept. Sommers had created and written a radio show in 1950 called Granby’s Green Acres (Jay Sommers, CBS, 1950). It had had a short life due to the demise of radio shows as television became the dominant home medium, but the concept had been well-received (Hollis 2008). Sommer proposed Green Acres, which became another CBS success story: hailed long afterwards as one of the network’s ‘brightest offerings of the mid-1960s’ (Folkart 1985). In Green Acres, the veteran actor Eddie Albert played the role of Oliver Wendell Douglas, a Manhattan lawyer who had longed since his youth to be a farmer. His Hungarian wife Lisa, played by Eva Gabor, loved city life, fashion and shopping. In the pilot, Oliver surprises Lisa with the news that he has purchased a farm in Hooterville, an ambiguous space right down the tracks from Petticoat Junction and yet ‘in a totally different universe’ (Anon 1992).

Lisa and Oliver banter in the memorable theme song: Oliver: The chores! Lisa: The stores! Oliver: Fresh air! Lisa: Times Square!

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Oliver: You are my wife … Lisa: Goodbye, city life! Together: Green Acres – we are there!

After its cancellation in 1970, Green Acres went into syndication. Critics have looked back at the show and have found progressive themes; reframed, the corniness can be seen as campiness. Although the show was grouped with other rural sitcoms, it differed from The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, according to one critic, who described those two shows as having had an underlying ‘smug condescension toward life in the country: The rural lifestyle was painted as something most viewers could feel safe, and superior, in snickering at. Green Acres had a notably different subtext’ (Lewis 1990). This critic goes on to say that he has ‘long had a pet theory’ Green Acres was the only network television show that ‘truly captured the spirit of the ’60s counterculture while it was in full bloom’ (Lewis 1990): what Charles Reich (1970) would have called Consciousness III or the ‘greening of America’. Oliver rejected ‘the perks of Establishment society [Consciousness II] in favor of a new life more closely rooted to the land’ (Lewis 1990). He took great, sincere pleasure in planting crops, even if he did not exactly have a green thumb. He had a deep respect for his neighbours, who were much more successful as farmers; he never looked down on them. Like the counterculture of the 1960s, Oliver believed ‘in his heart that he would be happier and more fulfilled by a life of honest work that yielded modest but tangible rewards, more like the agrarian America that predated the Industrial Revolution’ (Lewis 1990). In the cultural discourse of the 1960s, however, Green Acres was lumped in with other, also popular, rural-themed shows at CBS and was cancelled accordingly. By 1968, CBS was the clear front-runner among the three major networks (Anon 1968). Much of its success could be attributed to rural-themed shows. The Andy Griffith Show (Arthur Stander, CBS, 1960–68) was the #1 television programme, but Andy Griffith (the star of the show, who played a small-town sheriff in North Carolina) was anxious to retire. The Western Gunsmoke (Norman MacDonnell and John Meston, CBS, 1955–75) was in the fourth place overall. Four other rural-oriented programmes were in the top ten of all network shows: The Beverly Hillbillies (fifth), Red Skelton (the comedy variety show, seventh; Red Skelton, CBS, 1951–71), Green Acres (ninth), and Gomer Pyle (a spin-off from The Andy Griffith Show, tenth; Aaron Ruben, CBS, 1964–69; Anon 1968). This popularity of rural programming was challenged, however, especially by executives at the competitor network NBC, which consistently and deliberately framed or spun CBS’s popularity as indicative of a hayseed mentality that was not sufficiently urban as to be worthy of advertising dollars. Although Les Brown’s (1971) book Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box represents 1970 as the year that the networks began to engage in ‘demographic thinking’ – resulting in the rural purge and the chase for ‘quality’ viewers over quantity, an industry discourse regarding ‘quality’ viewers had been underway for several years. As early as 1953, however, NBC had begun to analyse and characterize its daytime viewership in terms of ‘quality’ demographics: that is, relatively affluent, presumably white females. Its Nielsen ratings – the standard gold measure of television viewership – in its evening programming trailed those of CBS; yet throughout the 1960s NBC goaded CBS into becoming defensive about its ‘lesser quality’ audience: older and rural viewers, in particular. NBC was effective in deflecting attention away from its lower Nielsen ratings and in presenting itself as the audience of ‘quality’ viewers:

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younger, urban, better educated, hipper and presumably more affluent. NBC expanded and intensified this discourse throughout the 1950s and 1960s; in 1963, executives declared NBC as ‘the leading network for upper-income, upper-educated, young adults’ (Alvey 2004: 47). In contrast, they described CBS as the network for lower-educated, lower-income, 55-years-and-older adults, and children, and mocked its rural sitcoms (Alvey 2004: 47). In NBC Bulletins between 1963 and 1970, the network used its Nielsen ratings when possible to declare its superiority, but largely had to resort to a more defensive strategy of demographic thinking, highlighting quality over quantity when CBS’s ratings were highest, as was often the case, among the three networks. Alvey (2004) describes NBC’s strategy as a largely ‘post-facto measure’; in fact, NBC could not sell its shows on demographics alone. Alvey makes a convincing case that demographic thinking – largely driven by NBC – had taken hold in network politics and strategies before 1970. In June of 1963, Variety published an article by Herm Schoenfeld called, ‘Quo Vadis TV: Class or Corn?’ This binary oppositional framing can be seen as a code not only for class, but also as an urban-rural dichotomy or forced choice. At the same time, NBC was celebrating its young-adult viewership (Schoenfeld 1963). In the mid-1960s, George Rosen (1965) wrote a Variety article and declared: ‘This year as never before Madison Avenue advertisers and TV analysts are scrutinizing audience composition and demographic data’ (47). In the following years, as the two networks battled back and forth for the top spot in the ratings, NBC continued to claim that it had ‘more definitive audience measurements’ than the other networks, especially CBS. At times the discursive battle seemed to be as much about New York versus Hollywood production as it was urban versus rural. In some of the discourse coming out of New York, Hollywood- produced television was synonymous with ‘volume entertainment’, and there was a warning: ‘Hollywood had best join the late 1960s or, in desperation, the networks will be turning elsewhere’ (Gould 1967: D27). By the end of the middle of the 1966–67 season, CBS was reconsidering its popularity among older adults and began to express concern about its performance with the 18- to 34-year-old age group. The long-running Western Gunsmoke was cancelled and later reinstated in a new time period. The sniping continued. Overall by 1969, CBS had led in the national Nielsen ratings for fourteen straight years, but one CBS executive pointed out that ‘NBC always drags out that demographics argument when they don’t get the ratings’ and a NBC executive countered, ‘It’s not how many; it’s who they are’. Another NBC representative claimed that ‘Buying CBS is like buying Grit’, then a weekly newspaper, catering to small-town and rural consumers (Prial 1969: 8). Some changes among CBS executives, such as President Robert Wood (1969–76) and Vice President for Programming Fred Silverman (1970–75) contributed to the hastening of the demographic thinking process (Anon 1970f). Both men are ‘credited’ with masterminding the rural purge associated with the 1970–71 season, although Alvey (2004) argues that the process of shedding the ‘Country Broadcasting System’ image had been building for a few years by the time they assumed their positions. Alvey (2004: 58) describes the ‘quest for quality demographics’ as ‘an evolutionary process rather than an explosion’. Alvin (2004) goes on to note how in the final analysis, what was even more culturally destructive than the purge (or what he calls a ‘pruning’) itself was ‘the arrogance, ageism and implicit racism’ in the rhetoric. If, in this rhetoric, ‘older, rural viewers were at the fringes of the radar, racial minorities might as well have been in another system’ (Alvey 2004: 59). Alvey does not mention

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gender in the conclusion of his essay, but gender along with age is present in the piece’s title: ‘Too many kids and old ladies’. Gender does figure prominently in Kirsten Lentz’s (2000) analysis of early 1970s television, especially of representations on CBS. Using what might be described as a feminist cultural studies analysis, Lentz argues that the new programmes CBS introduced to replace its rural sitcoms became immersed in a new binary opposition: quality versus relevance. This quality-versus-relevance binary replaced the quality-versus-quantity opposition, Lentz argues, although all of the networks still sought to obtain the highest Nielsen ratings. This latter binary could be attributed in part to two different, independent television production companies: Mary Tyler Moore (MTM) Enterprises (created with Moore’s then-husband, Grant Tinker) and Tandem/TAT Productions (created by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin). MTM Enterprises created The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–77), which articulated some feminist ideas (a modern, independent woman making it on her own in a career) without being overtly political. At the same time, it reinforced a kind of feminine, ladylike elegance. It represented ‘quality’, according to Lentz (2000). Other CBS programmes, produced and directed by Norman Lear, framed their discourse around ‘relevance’, which Lentz (2000) argues was gendered as a masculine discourse. ‘Relevance’ referred to grappling in a much grittier way with themes such as race relations and the war. The sitcom All in the Family (Norman Lear, CBS, 1971–79) featured Archie Bunker, an arch-conservative, racially prejudiced, rude man living in the Queens borough of New York City with his wife Edith and their daughter and son-in-law; the younger family members represented Consciousness III and had much more liberal politics. M*A*S*H was the other relevant show produced and directed by Norman Lear; it depicted doctors who did not believe in war but were officers in the Korean War, responsible for putting soldiers back together in makeshift surgical theatre. Overall, Lentz (2000: 56) argues that, ‘Television […] enfolded feminism into the project of advancing not the female subject but the “subject” of television’, which she sees as a highly self-referential medium. Correspondingly, it was in the 1970s that television studies began to be accepted as a legitimate area of study; critics viewed the medium as beginning to clear away ‘the vulgar, raucous escapism of the wasteland years’ of the 1960s. All of this, however, came at the expense of tens of millions of viewers who might have actually managed to find some kind of meaning and pleasure in rural programming (Alvey 2004). Reflecting back on the shift in television programming between the 1960s and the 1970s, one could say that some aspects of Consciousness III – including elements of the youth, feminist, and anti-war movements – were evident. But the very discourses that supported these ideas emerged at the expense of, as Pat Buttram from Green Acres remarked, ‘anything with a tree’ (Harkins 2004). It was in some ways an un-greening, within a context that uneasily equated rurality with old age and urbanity with youth. Cultural contradictions and ambivalences associated with rurality and urbanity remained and still remain. There is a great deal of ‘unfinished business’ from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and arguably today’s reality shows represent these ongoing contradictions and ambivalences: a topic beyond the scope of this article.

Fashion’s rural-ish appropriations A peasant blouse. The folkloric look. Prairie fashion. Although urbanity is frequently presumed to be a fundamental characteristic of modern US fashion, the course of its history is replete with an ebbing and flowing flirtation with

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references to rural styles and places, near and far. At times nostalgic and at times ironic, recurring representations of rural life may suggest that fashion’s urban identity is not entirely secure. Or, following Fred Davis’s (1992) theory of identity ambivalences, we might say that the urban-rural binary constitutes a kind of cultural fault line that produces ongoing tension as well as inspiration. At the same time representations of anything rural were disappearing from television, they were increasing in the world of fashion. Variously labelled as the ‘peasant look’ or the ‘folkloric look’, styles inspired by and appropriated from a variety of ethnic cultural histories of dress – primarily outside the United States – graced the pages of Vogue Magazine. These styles were accessible, ‘authentic’, romantic. Peasant blouses adorned with embroidery, for example, could be made at home by those with some sewing skills; they went well with jeans, and they could mesh with the mainstreaming of the countercultural consciousness of the late 1960s. As far apart as the ‘country corn’ comedies of the 1960s were from folkloric fashions of the early 1970s, they both grapple with deeper tensions between rural and urban spaces/places. That is, folkloric fashion and country corn both ‘work’ the rural-urban binary. Unresolved rural-urban cultural ambivalences and anxieties not only provide fuel for fashion change, but also offer fodder for comedic misunderstandings and out-of-place ironies. As cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (Jally 1997) puts it, representations do not re-present an existing reality; rather they constitute reality in the ‘event’ itself. In the case of television and fashion, the event may become a sitcom or a photo shoot, respectively. In addition to who gets represented, the event involves a sense of where and when. As Vogue’s archive reveals, the fashion magazine has represented – almost exclusively – white, young, urban, bourgeois or upper-class females. Class issues especially concern us as we compare the purging (or ‘pruning’) of rural television programming with fashion representations in US Vogue. The desire for, or catering to, a ‘quality’ audience, is about more than the obvious difference between a ‘hillbilly’ or lower- or working-class, rural southern audience of ‘country corn’ and a bourgeois or upper-class Vogue audience of (presumably) urban fashion. Yet the story is even more complicated than class: a feminist cultural studies perspective leads us to explore the intersectionalities among gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, ‘race’, place/space, age, and so on. Constructions of class and place/space, after all, are co-created with ‘race’ (i.e. whiteness), gender (i.e. femininity in the case of Vogue, and both masculine and feminine southern rurality in the case of rural sitcoms), ethnicity (poor Scottish-Irish Appalachian roots, for example, contrasted with the wealthier northern European roots coupled with appropriations from Bavarian, Eastern European, Russian and other [e.g. Mexican, Asian, Native American] indigenous and peasant cultures), and other subject positions. A search of the Vogue archives reveals that peasant-related terms such as ‘folkloric’ resonate especially in the 1970s but have earlier references in fashion ads. In July 1955, the apparel manufacturer Wilmo of California advertised ‘folklore colors by Einiger’ (a mill in Los Angeles), indicating that these colours have a ‘vaguely ethnic reference’ (Anon 1955a). This ad depicts three Chinese children in patterned clothing, looking anxious and sad. A wealthy white woman in a cashmere coat, also wearing leather gloves and a fur hat, stands there with them, pointing and directing them where to go. The ad caption reads: ‘All the rice in China couldn’t buy a cashmere coat!’ (Anon 1955a). An August 1955 Vogue ad by Einiger Mills features ‘folklore colors: pebble pink, colt navy, limestone white, Apache red, Navaho blue, black,

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desert nude, tumbleweed, Aztec gold, etc.’ (Anon 1955b: 40). An October 1955 ad by the same interrelated companies features ‘folklore colors: burnt orange and beige – a costume in cashmere tweed’ (Anon 1955c: 46). By the mid- to late 1960s, Vogue was extolling the virtues of rural peasant Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia: an October 1967 Vogue editorial highlights fashion ‘in the country of the heart’, represented through Tyrolean fashion as ‘timeless as the deep-scented fields and the winding lanes that meander from wooded heights down to tiny clusters of towns’. The model wears a black Tyrolean hat with a brim featuring wild mountain flowers, along with an aproned dirndl and other items (Anon 1967: 78). By July 1970, the peasant or folkloric influence had become the clear ‘new fashion’: ‘You’re going to love the way you look in the new fashion’, consisting of a wool challis peasant dress, a shawl, beads and boots (Anon 1970b: 50–79). As noted in the epigraph to this article, by August 1970, the message was clear: ‘Don’t be confused […]; this is the look. Your dress can be a printed peasanty dirndl’ in a red midi-length outfit by Bill Blass (Anon 1970c: 48, 55). The same issue features an ad by Vogue Patterns: ‘the challis print mididress in your life’, also with a red print and featuring tiny red flowers on black. The ‘mididress in your life’ was a ‘little peasant dirndl’ (Anon 1970d: 70–71, 138). In October of 1970, Vogue featured YSL’s peasant shirts and tunics worn belted over velvet britches (Anon 1970e: 86–87): decidedly ‘costume-y’, in Charles Reich’s (1970) terms. Reich characterized ‘costumes’ as an alternative – along with ‘natural’ colours and material, including denim jeans – to the uniformity of men’s business suits. Costumes of the young (the baby boom generation at the time), according to Reich, were ‘not masks’, as noted earlier, but rather are sites for ‘exploration of self and the world’ (Reich 1970: 254). Whose world? Lefebvre (1991 [1974]) argues that it is only through a ‘critical study of space’ that the ‘concept of appropriation’ can be clarified (165). Whereas Reich (1970) was a bit celebratory in his descriptions of the ‘exploration of self and the world’, questions remain: Who benefits (or not) from such explorations? And, how do such explorations compare with those of viewers watching rural-based television programming? Compellingly, some of the answers to these questions lie in the tendency for Vogue to co-opt romanticized notions of rurality, in contrast to television’s cancellation to rural programming. Questions of when and where, along with those of class, arise: it seems that rural representations were okay in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so long as they were framed elsewhere and/or in the past. The idea of contemporary, ‘country corn’ or – in the case of fashion illustrations – ironic contrasts, was and arguably still is not as acceptable as rurality in the past and elsewhere. We can consider further examples from popular (and high) culture to make this case. Rural, romantic and ethnic themes continued to resonate in Vogue throughout the 1970s: Givenchy’s ‘romantic looks in the country’ (Anon 1971: 42–63); ‘romantic’ almost-ankle circle skirts, golden hoop earrings, cotton babushkas, ‘gypsy’ shirts, ‘super Oriental’ tops and dresses, and Provençal peasant dresses (Anon 1973: 65, 67); ‘wonderful little cotton-y things that used to be only in ethnic shops’ (Anon 1975: 84–85) and so on. In 1976, YSL went full throttle with the peasant or folkloric look; the October 1976 Vogue issue described his line as ‘the romance that shook the world’ and as going ‘the whole ethnic route’: a hooded burnoose coat, peasant blouses, an ivory‑belted dirndl and ‘Saint Laurent gypsy’. Especially featured were the Tyrol, Romania and the Balkans (Anon 1976: 206–11).

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In the December 1976 issue, as described in the introduction to this article, art critic Pierre Schneider (1976: 172) was laudatory in his analysis of Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘farmland elegance’. As Reich (1970) had written earlier about the virtues of personal exploration through costume, Schneider (1976: 172) celebrated YSL’s folklore collection as including ‘costumes with authority that comes from beginnings’: those rural beginnings, Schneider (1976: 235) argued, like folklore, mark the same kind of kinship that is associated with ‘weaving, storytelling, clothing’. He went on to equate peasant cultures with nature and ‘the permanent (the elements) or the cyclical (the seasons)’, as contrasted with urban culture and its relation to history and change. YSL’s collection, he submitted, helped to reconnect ‘with the gods, the beginnings’, not as ‘nostalgia for the past, but for the eternal present which lies on the other side of the past’: ‘Saint Laurent’s collection marks the end of fashion, but it also heralds the return of costume’ (Schneider 1976: 235). Schneider’s pronouncement suggested that YSL had rescued clothing from the refuse of fashion history and had launched it into a new terrain: one of costume-y exploration that is somewhat consistent with Reich’s (1970) concepts – and definitively inconsistent with those of rural television programming that cast country life in a US southern-based, poor, white and rural lifestyle. Whereas the concept of rural ‘costume’ has connotations of historical and cultural ‘otherness’, that of poor white rural clothing in the United States has other, less flattering and less romantic undertones.

Closing thoughts On 14 March 2013, Tamron Hall – a news anchor on The Today Show (Sylvester L. Weaver Jr, NBC, 1952-) – announces that, for the second time, First Lady Michelle Obama would be on the cover of Vogue Magazine (in the April 2013 issue). Hall offers a brief preview of the interview inside and then proceeds to talk about First Lady Obama’s fashion sense. As the television screen spans the upcoming cover with Obama wearing a blue sleeveless dress, Hall notes that the designer of the dress is Reed Krakoff. Hall apologizes if she is mispronouncing the name; after all, Hall explains, ‘I’m just a hillbilly from Texas’. Weather anchor Al Roker responds with a question: ‘where’s Jed Clampett when you need him?’ This brief reporting by Tamron Hall and her exchange with Al Roker struck a chord. Al Roker’s quip about Jed Clampett, the lead character of The Beverly Hillbillies suggests that there is an assumed cultural memory regarding the 1960s rural sitcom. Further, this vignette raises questions for us regarding the intersectionalities among class, place/space and ‘race’. The hillbilly stereotype typically conjures the image of a poor, white, rural, southern individual (Harkins 2004), whereas Vogue still predominantly features wealthy, white, presumably urban (especially New York) women. Like Michelle Obama, Tamron Hall is a beautiful African American woman, with an unpretentious yet stylish sense of fashion that is inconsistent with the (white) hillbilly stereotype. Al Roker, too, is African American, and his quick quip about Jed Clampett piques our interest about audience reception, because since working on this project and talking with colleagues informally and at a Popular Culture Association meeting, it has been fascinating to us to hear diverse remembrances of shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres, in the 1960s or as later re-runs. From a feminist cultural studies perspective, intersectional studies (i.e. analyses of the co-construction of ‘race’, gender, class, place/space, age/generation,

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and other subject positions) of ‘receptions’ of and negotiations with fashion and television, jointly and comparatively, would be a very interesting topic for further study. Consideration of ‘race’ and ethnicity in conjunction with rurality, class and other vectors of identity contributes to the complexity of interpreting the cancellation of rural television programming and fashion’s co-optation of European and Russian peasant dress in the late 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps influencing CBS’s cancellation of sitcoms framed in white, southern, rural contexts was a concern that there needed to be more cultural diversity in television representations, especially after the events of the 1960s and the growing impact of the civil rights movements. Yet this concern does not come through in the media discourse as much as the disregard for rurality. In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, about 35 years after the rural purge, one writer commented:

Certainly, some of these shows were at their end anyhow, but Mr. Silverman’s [the CBS President’s] agenda was explicit. Whether it was a strict business maneuver based on a smaller advertiser demand for these shows’ large audiences or Mr. Silverman’s personal bias [against rural southerners], a cultural sting was associated with the purge and is still recalled bitterly by the shows’ producers and performers, as well as by their old fans from Washington. (Hoyt 2004)

Typically, Vogue – like fashion studies, we would argue – too has been unabashedly urban in its focus, although there have been hints of little pockets of rurality (safely framed in the past or ‘elsewhere’) now and again, as in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to lend an air of authenticity as well as irony. Identity ambivalences, on all kinds of levels and including those related to rural-urban dynamics, emerge as ‘fashion’s code modifications’ encodes tensions, ‘now highlighting this, muting that, juxtaposing what was previously disparate, inverting major to minor and vice versa’ (Davis 1992: 18). Overall, Vogue’s constructions of space are likely to be ‘abstract’, in Lefebvre’s (1991 [1974]) terms, and only achieve the status of ‘social space’, when individuals fashion their bodies and their sense of place in everyday life. Fashion’s co-optations function differently, we argue, than television cancellations. Bits of rurality – however problematic – continue to pop into fashion’s ‘abstract’ and ‘social’ spaces in an ongoing way, articulating culture’s unspoken identity ambivalences. We hope to see more critical, intersectional analyses of fashion’s play with rurality and urbanity in fashion studies, because issues of place/space and their representations (or lack thereof) matter. We wonder to what extent issues of cancellation and co-optation influence what may currently be conceptualized, unfortunately, not simply as a rural-urban binary but further as a rural-urban cultural divide. Differences between rurality and urbanity become implicated in everything from electoral politics to the gun-control debate to mail delivery. Space matters.

References Alvey, Mark (2004), ‘“Too many kids and old ladies”: Quality demographics and 1960s US television’, Screen, 45: 1, pp. 40–62. Anon (1955a), ‘Advertisement: Wilmo’, Vogue, July, p. 1. Anon (1955b), ‘Advertisement: Einiger Mills’, Vogue, August, p. 40.

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Anon (1955c), ‘Advertisement: Folklore colors’, Vogue, October, p. 46. Anon (1967), ‘Fashion: In the country of the heart – circling black loden cloth’, Vogue, October, pp. 78–97. Anon (1968), ‘CBS dominates top spots on Nielsen poll’, Los Angeles Times, 21 February, p. E23. Anon (1970a). ‘Silverman in new CBS job’, Los Angeles Times, 24 June, p. F17. Anon (1970b), ‘Vogue’s eye view: Paris says: This is the year to do your own thing with your hemline’, Vogue, March, pp. 41–69. Anon (1970c), ‘Fashion: Don’t be confused: This is the look’, Vogue, August, pp. 48–55. Anon (1970d), ‘Fashion: Vogue patterns: The challis print mididress in your life’, Vogue, August, pp. 70–1, 138. Anon (1970e), ‘Fashion: Saint Laurent: Tunics belted over britches …’, Vogue, October, pp. 86–87. Anon (1970f), ‘Silverman in new CBS job’, Los Angeles Times, 24 June, p. F17. Anon (1971), ‘Great new ready-to-wear looks from Paris, Italy, Spain: Right here, right now’, Vogue, February, pp. 42–63. Anon (1973), ‘Vogue boutique: Romantic!’, Vogue, August, pp. 65, 67. Anon (1975), ‘Vogue’s point of view: Fashion now: What to look forward to in fashion this year’, Vogue, January, pp. 77–91, 150. Anon (1976), ‘Saint Laurent: The romance that shook the world’, Vogue, October, pp. 206–11. Anon (1992), ‘You watch that??!! Celebrities confess their viewing sins: “Studs”, “Green Acres” … the list goes on’, Los Angeles Times, 26 April, p. 2. Brown, Les (1971), Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Cox, Stephen (1992), ‘Good as Texas tea’, Los Angeles Times, 20 September, p. 81. Davis, Fred (1992), Fashion, Culture and Identity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Folkart, Burt A. (1985), ‘“Lum and Abner”, “Green Acres” among credits Jay Sommers, prolific writer for radio, TV shows, dies at 68’, Los Angeles Times, 28 September, p. 4. Gould, Jack (1967), ‘The new old season’, New York Times, 17 September, p. D27. Harkins, Anthony (2004), Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Hollis, Tim (2008), Ain’t That a Knee-Slapper: Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hoyt, Edward O’N. (2004), ‘TV’s rural purge’, Washington Post, 2 December, p. A34. Jally, Sut (1997), Stuart Hall – Representation and the Media, Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce. cgi?preadd=action&key=409. Accessed 6 August 2013. James, Meg (2003a), ‘“Beverly Hillbillies”? CBS has struck crude, Appalachia says: A rural activist will ask the network president to cancel the planned “reality” show: Critics call the search for a suitable family “a hick hunt”’, Los Angeles Times, 11 February, p. A1. James, Meg (2003b), ‘CBS chief meets rural group’, Los Angeles Times, 12 February, p. C3.

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Johnson, Fenton (2003), ‘Television: Gold in them thar hillbillies’, Los Angeles Times, 26 January, p. M6. LeFebvre, Henri (1991 [1974]), The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith), Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lentz, Kirsten Marthe (2000), ‘Quality versus relevance: Feminism, race, and the politics of the sign in 1970s television’, Camera Obscura, 43: 15, pp. 44–93. Lewis, Randy, (1990), ‘Acres of corn but nuggets of satire’, Los Angeles Times, 16 May, p. 2. Lewis, Randy (1994), ‘The way rural ‘Hillbillies’ creator Paul Henning, to be honored in Santa Ana, looks back’, Los Angeles Times, 5 February, p. 1. McLellan, Dennis (2005), ‘Obituaries, Paul Henning, 93, created “Beverly Hillbillies”, other comedies for TV’, Los Angeles Times, 26 March, p. B16. Podber, Jacob J. (2008), ‘Television’s arrival in the Appalachian mountains of the USA’, Media History, 14: 1, pp. 35–52. Prial, Frank J. (1969), ‘TV ratings battle ends: CBS, NBC both claim top spot’, Wall Street Journal, 5 May, p. 8. Reich, Charles (1970), The Greening of America, New York: Bantam Books. Rosen, George (1965), ‘For those who think young’, Variety, 20 January, p. 47. Schneider, Pierre (1976), ‘Features: The assurance of dreams’, Vogue, December, pp. 166–73, 234–35. Schoenfeld, Herm (1963), ‘Quo vadis TV: Class or corn?’, Variety, 26 June, p. 27. Schwartz, Daniel (2010), ‘The greening of America turns 40’, CBC News, 27 September, http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2010/09/23/f-greening- reich.html. Accessed 6 August, 2013. Simon, Richard (2003), ‘The nation: “Call off your hillbilly hunt”, Senator tells CBS about show’, Los Angeles Times, 26 February, p. A9. Spigal, Lynn (1992), Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Lou (2004), Establishing Dress History, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Suggested citation Kaiser, S. B. and Bernstein S. T. (2014), ‘Rural representations in fashion and television: Co-optation and cancellation’, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, pp. 97–117, doi: 10.1386/fspc.1.1.97_1

Contributor Details Susan B. Kaiser is Professor of Women and Gender Studies, as well as Textiles and Clothing, at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context (1985, 1990, 1997), Cultural Studies of Fashion (2012), and nearly 100 articles and book chapters in the fields of cultural studies, fashion studies, gender studies, semiotics, sociology, and textiles and clothing. She is a Fellow and Past President of the International Textile and Apparel Association. She is currently conducting research to explore the intersections among fashion, space/place, and temporality; she also has a continuing interest in material masculinities and feminist cultural studies.

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Contact: Women and Gender Studies, One Shields Avenue, UC Davis, Davis CA, 95616, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Sara Tatyana Bernstein holds an MA in Visual Culture: Costume Studies from New York University and will receive her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis in the summer of 2013. She is the author and co-author of several articles examining historical and ideological relationships between fashion and other mass-produced representational media. Her dissertation, From Little Black Dress to Little Blue Vest: Fashion, Film and the Shifting Position of the American Shopgirl is a genealogy of the shopgirl as a social type, from the paradigmatic modern girl and consumer/spectator in the early twentieth century to the ‘sales associate’, a figure who tends to represent social invisibility despite retail being the largest employment sector in the US. Contact: Cultural Studies Graduate Group, One Shields Avenue, UC Davis, Davis CA 95616, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Susan B. Kaiser and Sara Tatyana Bernstein have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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FSPC_1.1_Kaiser_Bernstein_97-117.indd 117 8/30/13 6:05:10 PM Fashion, Style & Popular Culture CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A SPECIAL ISSUE Latin American/Latino Fashion, Style & Popular Culture

Guest Editors: José Blanco F., Textiles, Merchandising and Interiors, University of Georgia Raúl J. Vázquez-López, Romance Languages, University of Georgia

This special issue brings attention to the past, present and future of Latin American and Latino fashion and style as they relate to popular culture. The issue seeks scholarly research articles from a wide range of disciplines. We are interested in the cultural Special process of fashion and how meaning is created or derived from popular culture outlets that reflect or discuss fashion and style. Our aim is to explore the creative output of issue fashion and style in popular culture not only in Latin American countries but also as it has evolved in the hands of those who migrated to other areas. Research on the balance between globalized and unique local identities expressed through fashion and popular culture is also welcomed, including discussions of Latino stereotypes and diverging ideas of beauty, style and formality. Some central issues are those related to fashion, style and popular culture as a reflection of Latin American lifestyles and cultural diversity, and the survival and influence of native, African and European dress in the forging of fashion and style identities. We are also interested in the development of the fashion system in the area, including emerging markets, designers, brands and venues and shifting values and perceptions of fashion and style in popular culture as a result of globalization. ISSN 2050-0726 Online ISSN 2050-0734 Possible topics include but are not limited to: 3 issues per volume Volume 1, 2014 • Fashion and style in the context of popular literature, music, film, television, telenovelas, beauty pageants, soccer, comic strips, etc. Editors • Dance and fashion (from tango to reggaeton). Joseph H. Hancock II Drexel University • Ideals of beauty, body image, full-figure women and gender issues. [email protected] • Fashion and style stereotypes. • Fashion migration, national identity and memory, subcultural identities and power Vicki Karaminas relations. University of Technology, Sydney • Latin American fashion and style in the shadow of colonization and dictatorships. [email protected] • Connections between urban fashion and rural traditions, reÐappropriation of fashion Associate Editors and style. Shaun Cole • Postmodern fashion in Latin American/Latino communities. London College of Fashion • The impact of popular culture products from the United States, Europe and other areas. Patricia A. Cunningham • Religious and social events such as weddings, quinceañera parties, etc. Ohio State University • Style for the workplace and formal events. • Festival, carnival and other celebrations. Susan Kaiser • Sustainability, DIY, manufacturing and sweatshops in Latin America. University of California, Davis • Impact of trade agreements on fashion and popular culture production. Anne Peirson-Smith • Global impact of Latin American designers. City University of Hong Kong • Luxury brands in Latin America. • Latin American/Latino fashion and style as disseminated in artistic, academic, media Reviews Editors and social media venues. Jessica Strubel University of North Texas Manuscripts should be approximate 5,000 words and prepared using the Intellect Journal [email protected] House Style which may be accessed at: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/MediaManager/File/Intellect%20style%20guide.pdf. Sue Osmond University of Technology, Sydney Deadline for manuscripts is: 1 February 2014 Please send manuscripts to: José Blanco F.: [email protected] or Raul J. Vazquez- Sara Bernstein Lopez: [email protected] University of California, Davis For questions regarding submissions or inquiries regarding the journal, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, please contact Co-editor Joseph H. Hancock, II at [email protected].

Intellect Journals www.intellectbooks.com

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