Customers with Cameras
It’s easy to find the pages of Frederick’s lingerie catalogues, and I recommend looking them up for their brilliant art and sassy captions (like the one I copied for the title of this site). My search for content showing in-store images of Frederick’s, though, proved less fruitful. Libraries and archives didn’t seem interested in stocking photographs of, say, the grand opening of the Frederick’s location in Vegas.
I turned instead to a business registry that listed nearly every Frederick’s of Hollywood store in the US by address. I took these locations and searched them up one by one, but again, little turned up, so I shifted my focus to Yelp. There, I could input each Frederick’s address and see whether any customers had added photos along with their reviews. This was where I ran into a treasure trove of images of shop displays, mannequins, promotional materials, and of course, lingerie. At first, Yelp felt a bit too lowbrow a source, and I regretted that these images didn’t show the people in the stores, which was the subject I was most interested in. Ultimately, though, I love these pictures because they show what Frederick’s looked like through the customers’ own lenses. And at the end of the day, the whole thing is lowbrow anyway. These Yelp photographs, I feel, just embrace that Frederick’s kitsch.
