From Elegance to Modernism: The Reception of Vogue in Hungarian Culture During the Interwar Period

My study focuses on the reception of the fashion magazine Vogue in Hungary during the interwar period, from the perspective of periodical studies and literary modernism. I consider Vogue as a dialogue-based magazine format that not only is a repository, reflective of sociocultural realities, but also shapes them. It is from this perspective that I consider the circulation of Vogue in the Hungarian cultural and social context of the time, examining the relationship between the Hungarian press and Vogue’s international publishing strategy. My study specifically touches upon the media campaign launched for the short-lived German edition in Hungary. In the second half of the article, the focus shifts to the relationship between Vogue and Miklós Szentkuthy’s Prae (1934), relying on the text of the novel, the author’s manuscripts, and the surviving copies of Vogue in his library. This analysis addresses a lesser-known dimension of Vogue’s impact in Central Europe, namely how its textual and visual materials contributed to modernist literary experimentation. Synthesizing media discourse analysis with fine-grained archival research, this study demonstrates how tracking interwar circulation and reception through both press content and personal archives conceptualizes Vogue as an active agent in the transnational exchange between international fashion media and the Hungarian local context.