The 1920s saw the emergence of three major women's fashion magazines: Vogue, The Queen, and Harper's Bazaar. Vogue was first published in 1892, but its up-to-date fashion information did not have a marked impact on women's desires for fashionable garments until the twenties. These magazines provided mass exposure for popular styles and fashions. Vogue functioned in America not only to provide sketches and patterns of fashions derived from Paris models, but also to promote French couture. Vogue illustrated as many as 33 models from Paris in each issue, and about twice as many American dresses. Advertisements provided many more images.

A look inside an issue of Vogue provides a glimpse, not only at the couture of the moment, but at what was being sold to Americans and in what package it was wrapped in. To read Vogue, one can see how fashion was just one component of what was needed to be a good, beautiful, cultured person in the 1920s and 1930s.