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Through thick and think: fashion and type
Typefaces are abstract. Barring letters that have an overt figurative origin (characters made of branches or rope), the domain of typography and lettering is refreshingly content-free, a matter of style, history and functionality. Yet, as typefaces and lettering are employed in related contexts, the associations of these contexts bleed into our understanding of the typeface itself. Type designer Tobias Frere-Jones once recounted his experience developing a logo for a company that produced hair products, false nails and perfume. After working to produce an appropriately ‘feminine’ logotype he arrives at a high-contrast sans serif that intuitively feels right. He checks his work against the competition by making a trip to the drugstore and discovers that Almay, L’Oréal, Revlon, Cover Girl and Maybelline follow an almost uniform typographic code, most sharing the stylistic root of the typeface Optima: he knew the ‘right’ typeface before he realised he knew it. ‘What is so feminine about Optima?’ he asks, as he wonders whether these gendered associations inhere in the forms of the typeface, or evolve from patterns of use. Such patterns of use can become so pronounced that they shape our understanding of typography. 1
This phenomenon is observable in the arena of fashion, where serif and sans serif tyefacestypefaces have articulated a certain landscape among fashion magazines and fashion brands. Over the twentieth century, carrying into the present, one can observe competing aesthetics of modernity, traceable through different uses of the ‘modern’ typefaces of Didot and Bodoni and the ‘avant-garde’ aesthetic of sans serif grotesques.
Fashion x-rays
The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century typefaces of the Frenchman Firmin Didot and the Italian Giambattista Bodoni are classified as modern because they introduced an extreme contrast between thick and thin elements, achieving a radical consistency among letter shapes by subjecting the variety of the alphabet to a thick / thin autocracy. 2 The result is a abstraction and precision, echoing their Enlightenment origins. Bodoni and Didot exaggerated the height and verticality of the ascenders and descenders of the letterforms, lending the characters an architectural grandeur. Bodoni described the ‘beauties of type’ as ‘conformity without ambiguity, variety without dissonance, and equality and symmetry without confusion. A second and not minor value is to be gained from sharpness and definition, neatness and finish.’ 3 Bodoni’s prescription would be equally at home in a classical treatise on type, or in a 1950s book on proper grooming for debutantes.
Didot and Bodoni dominated printing until the late nineteenth century, when the Arts and Crafts movement returned to the solidity of humanist letterforms and the texture of Renaissance printing (William Morris called Bodoni’s letterforms ‘shatteringly hideous’). 4 After fading from view, Bodoni and Didot made a comeback in the early twentieth century, partly because their geometric clarity seemed modern again. An Italian foundry, Nebiolo, issued a new cut of Bodoni in 1901, and ten years later the largest American foundry, ATF, issued its own very popular cut of Bodoni.
In 1912, Deberny + Peignot, bought the original punches of Didot, making the font newly accessible to designers. In a classic portrait, Charles Deberny, the head of the French foundry, was photographed with a beautiful poster-scaled Didot ‘a’ hovering in the background. It is from this fashionable context of European Modernism in the 1920s and 30s that America borrowed two of its most influential art directors, Dr Mehemed Fehmy Agha, who would art direct Vogue from 1929 to 1942, and Alexey Brodovitch, who served as art director at Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958. Both are credited with having imported a Modern approach to layout and photography, as well as a ‘Modernist’ sensibility about type.
Brodovitch had used Didot while working in Paris on Cahiers d’Art in the 1920s. In his reign as art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Didot was the black blade that cut the white space of his layouts. The font became the signature of Harper’s Bazaar as well as Brodovitch’s own signature: he used the font for the identity of his influential Design Laboratory at the New School. In the 1950s Bodoni (and its clownishly bloated progeny Bodoni Poster) was used in many other ‘design’ contexts. The cover of a 1950 Museum of Modern Art book, designed by Jack Dunbar, prominently displays its title, What Is Modern Design? in Bodoni, as if the question it asks is answered by the typeface, rendered in stark white letters on a black background.
Fashionising fonts
The canonisation or the ‘fashionisation’ of the Didone style can be observed in the evolution of Vogue magazine. In Vogue’s early pre-photographic covers, illustrators created lettering that worked with the style and spirit of their illustrations. This ethic was carried over as Vogue made the transition into the photographic era: photographers and designers created ambitiously varied and inventive approaches that integrated letterforms as part of a total approach to design. But even in those covers that did not integrate the lettering as part of the overall concept, type choices were extremely varied.
As late as 1955, Vogue covers vacillated between serif and sans serif typefaces, as well as script faces and illustrative, photographic letters. It was after 1955 that the magazine appears to have legislated a consistent use of the all-capitals banner headline set in Didone lettering. Apart from minor details, it has remained absolutely fixed since then, the trade-dress of a powerful international franchise.
notes and references
1. Tobias Frere-Jones, ‘Drugstore Travelogue’, Sex Appeal: The Art of Allure in Graphic and Advertising Design, ed. Steven Heller. Allworth Press, 2000.
2. My interest is in the broad stylistic characteristics of Bodoni and Didot; there are now more than 500 versions of Bodoni. (See Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis, Friedrich Friedl, Creative Type , Netherlands: Laren, 2005.)
3. Alexander Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface, Boston: Godine, 1990.
4. Lawson, p.200.
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