July-August, 1950
“WILL YOU WEAR A star in your hair at night ... or a little embroidered black veiling hat? ... Will you wear a close little choker of pearls or a medal on a long narrow velvet ribbon? ... Will you serve a lunch, in the garden, of prosciutto and melon and a wonderful green salad ... or sit in the St. Regis’ pale-pink roof and eat truite bleue?”...
It is the “Make Up Your Mind” issue: Vogue’s editresses are gently pressing the reader, in the vise of these velvet alternatives, to choose the looks that will “add up” to her look, the thing that is hers alone. “Will you make the point of your room a witty screen of drawings cadged from your artist friends ... or spend your all on a magnificent carpet of flowers that decorates and almost furnishes the room itself?”
Twenty years ago, when Vogue was on the sewing-room table of nearly every respectable upper-middle-class American house, these sapphic overtures to the subscriber, this flattery, these shared securities of prosciutto and wonderful and witty had no place in fashion’s realm. Vogue, in those days before Mademoiselle and Glamour and Charm and Seventeen, was an almost forbidding monitor enforcing the discipline of Paris. An iron conception of the mode governed its semimonthly rulings. Fashion was distinguished from dress; the woman of fashion, by definition, was a woman of a certain income whose clothes spoke the idiom of luxury and bon ton; there was no compromise with this principle. Furs, jewels, sumptuous materials, fine leathers, line, cut, atelier workmanship, were the very fabric of fashion; taste, indeed, was insisted on, but taste without money had a starved and middle-class pathos. The tastefully dressed little woman could not be a woman of style.
To its provincial subscribers Vogue of that epoch was cruel, rather in the manner of an upper servant. Its sole concession to their existence was a pattern department, Vogue’s Designs for Dressmaking, the relic of an earlier period when no American woman bought clothes in a shop. And these patterns, hard to cut out as they were, fraught with tears for the amateur, who was safer with the trusty Butterick, had an economical and serviceable look that set them off from the designer fashions: even in the sketches they resembled maternity dresses.
As for the columns of etiquette, the bridal advice, the social notes from New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco—all these pointedly declined acquaintance with the woman-from-outside who was probably their principal devotee. Yet the magazine was read eagerly and without affront. Provincial women with moderate incomes poured over it to pick up “hints,” carried it with them to the family dressmaker, copied, approximated, with a sense, almost, of pilferage. The fashion ideas they lifted made the pulse of the Singer race in nervous daring and defiance (What would Vogue say if it knew?).
This paradoxical relation between magazine and audience had a certain moral beauty, at least on the subscribers’ side—the beauty of unrequited love and of unflinching service to an ideal that is arbitrary, unsociable, and rejecting, like Kierkegaard’s God and Kafka’s Castle. Lanvin, Paquin, Chanel, Worth, Vionnet, Alix—these stars of the Paris firmament were worshipped and charted in their courses by reverent worshippers who would come no closer to their deities than to copy, say, the characteristic fagoting that Vionnet used in her dress yoke or treasure a bottle of Chanel’s Number Two on the bureau, next to father’s or husband’s photograph.
Like its competitor, Harper’s Bazaar, and following the French dressmaking tradition, Vogue centered about the mature woman, the femme du monde, the sophisticated young matron with her clubs, her charities, and her cardcase. The jewels, the rich fabrics, the furs and plumes, the exquisite corseting, the jabots and fringe, implied a sexual as well as a material opulence, something preening, flavorsome, and well satisfied. For the jeune fille (so defined) there was a page or two of party frocks, cut usually along princess lines, in pastel taffetas, with round necks. In this Racinean world, where stepmother Phèdre and grandmother Athalie queened it, the actual habits of the American young girl, who smoked and wore lipstick, were excised from consideration. Reality was inferior to style.
Covertly, the assumptions of this period remain in force. Despite social change, fashion is still luxurious. It is possible to dress prettily on a working girl’s or business wife’s income, but to dress handsomely is another matter, requiring, as before, time, care, and money. Fashion is a craft, not an industrial, conception, exemplifying to perfection the labor theory of value. The toil of many hands is the sine qua non of fashion. The hand of the weaver, the cutter, the fitter, the needleworker must be seen in the finished product in a hundred little details, and fashion knowledge, professionally, consists in the recognition and appraisal of the work that has gone into a costume. In gores and gussets and seams, in the polish of leather and its softness, the signature of painstaking labor must be legible to the discerning, or the woman is not fashionably dressed. The hand-knit sweater is superior to the machine-knit, not because it is more perfect, but on the contrary because its slight imperfections reveal it to be hand-knit. The Oriental pearl is preferred to the fine cultured pearl because the marine labor of a dark diver secured it, a prize wrested from the depths, and the woman who wears Oriental pearls believes that they show variations in temperature or that they change color with her skin or get sick when they are put away in the safe—in short, that they are alive, whereas cultured pearls, mass-stimulated in mass beds of oysters, are not. This sense of the accrued labor of others as a complement to one’s personality, as tribute in a double sense, is intrinsic to the fashionable imagination, which desires to feel that labor next to its skin, in the hidden stitching of its underwear—hence the passion for handmade lingerie even among women whose outer clothing comes off the budget rack.
In spite of these facts, which are known to most women, if only in the form of a sudden anguish or hopelessness (“Why can’t I look like that?”), a rhetoric of fashion as democracy, as an inherent right or manufacturer’s guarantee, has swept over the style world and created a new fashion public, a new fashion prose, and a whole hierarchy of new fashion magazines. Mademoiselle, Glamour, Charm—respectively “the magazine for smart young women,” “for the girl with the job,” “the magazine for the BG (Business Girl)” offer to the girl without means, the lonely heart, and the drudge, participation in the events of fashion, a sense of belonging, en masse and yet separately, individually, of being designed for, shopped for, read for, predicted for, cherished. The attention and care and consideration lavished on the woman of leisure by lady’s maid, coiffeur, vendeuse, bootmaker, jeweler, are now at the disposal of the masses through the various Shophounds, Mlles. Wearybones, beauty editors, culture advisers, male and female confidants. The impersonally conceived Well-Dressed Woman of the old Vogue (“What the Well-Dressed Woman Will Wear”) is tutoyered, so to speak, as You (“Will you wear a star in your hair? ...”); and a tone of mixed homage and familiarity: “For you who are young and pretty,” “For you who have more taste than money,” gives the pronoun a custom air.
The idea of a custom approach to ready-made, popular-priced merchandise was first developed by Mademoiselle, a Street and Smith publication launched during the depression, which differed from Vogue and the Bazaar, on the one hand, and from McCall’s and Pictorial Review, expressions of the housewife, on the other. Before the depression, there had been, roughly speaking, only three types of women’s apparel: the custom dress, the better dress, and the budget or basement dress. Out of the depression came the college shop and out of this the whole institutionalized fiction of the “debutante” shop and the “young-timers’” floor. These departments, which from the very outset were swarming with middle-aged shoppers, introduced a new category of merchandise: the “young” dress, followed by the “young” hat, the “young” shoe, the “young” petticoat, and so on. The “young” dress was a budget dress with status, an ephemeral sort of dress, very often—a dress that excited comment and did not stand up very well. Its popularity proved the existence of a new buying public of high school and college girls, secretaries and office workers, whose dress requirements were very different from those of the busy housewife or matron. What these buyers demanded, for obvious vocational reasons, was not a durable dress or a dress for special occasions, even, but the kind of dress that would provoke compliments from coworkers, fellow students, bosses—a dress that could be discarded after a few months or transformed by accessories into the simulation of a new dress. To this public, with its craving for popularity, its personality problems, and limited income, Mademoiselle addressed itself as “your” magazine, the magazine styled for you, individually.
Unlike the older magazines, whose editresses were matrons who wore (and still wear) their hats at their desks as though at a committee meeting at the Colony Club, Mademoiselle was staffed by young women of no social pretensions, college graduates and business types, live wires and prom queens, middle-class girls peppy or sultry, fond of fun and phonograph records. Its tone was gamely collegiate, a form of compliment perhaps, since its average reader, one would have guessed, was either beyond college or below it, a secretary or a high-school student. It printed fiction—generally concerned then with the problems of adolescence—job hints and news, beauty advice, and pages of popular-priced fashions photographed in Burpee-catalogued hues against glamorous backgrounds. Its models were windswept and cute.
Fashion as fun became Mademoiselle’s identifying byword, a natural corollary to the youth theme. Fun with food, tricks with spices, herbal magic, Hawaiian pineapple, Hawaiian ham, Hawaiian bathing trunks, Hollywood playclothes, cruise news, casserole cookery, Bar-B-Q sauce reflect the dream mentality of a civilization of office conscripts to whom the day off, the two weeks basking in the sun during February or August, represent not only youth but an effortless, will-less slack season (slacks, loafers, hostess pajamas), quite different from the dynamic good time of the 1920s.
In the Mademoiselle play world, everything is romp-diminutive or make-believe. The beau is a “cute brute,” the husband a “sahib,” or “himself,” or “the little fellow.” The ready-mix cake “turns out terrific.” Zircons are “almost indistinguishable from diamonds.” “Little tricks of combination, flavor and garnishment help the bride and enchant the groom ... who need never know!” Brides wearing thirty-five-dollar dresses are shown being toasted in champagne by ushers in ascots and striped trousers.
Work may be fun also. “I meet headline people on the Hill every day.” Husband-and-wife teams do “the exciting things” together. And the work-fun of a reader-surrogate named Joan, Mademoiselle’s Everygirl, is to be continually photographed backstage at “exciting” events, “meeting summer halfway on a Caribbean island,” meeting Maurice Evans in his dressing room, or gapily watching a chorus rehearsal. The word meet, in the sense of “coming into contact with or proximity of is a denotation of holiday achievement. Resort news is eternal, like hotel-folder sunshine.
The strain of keeping up this bright deception is marked by the grotesquerie of adverbs (“Serve piping hot with a dish of wildly hot mustard nearby”), by the repeated exclamation point, like a jerky, convulsive party smile, and by garish photographic effects. The typical Mademoiselle model with her adolescent, adenoidal face, snub nose, low forehead, and perpetually parted lips is immature in an almost painful fashion—on the plane, in the Parisian street, or the tropic hotel she appears out of place and ill at ease, and the photography which strives to “naturalize” her in exotic or expensive surroundings only isolates her still further. Against the marble columns or the balustrades, with fishing rod, sailboat, or native basket, she stands in a molar eternity, waving, gesticulating, like the figures in home movies of the vacation trip.
Another magazine, Seventeen, which from its recipes and correspondence column appears to be really directed to teenagers and their problems, strikes, by contrast with Mademoiselle, a grave and decorous note. Poorly gotten out and cheaply written, it has nevertheless an authentic small-town air; more than half its circulation is in towns under twenty-five thousand. It is not, strictly speaking, a fashion magazine (though it carries pages of fashions, gifts, and designs for knitting and dressmaking), but rather a home magazine on the order of Woman’s Home Companion. How to make things at home, simple dishes to surprise the family with, games to play at parties, nonalcoholic punches for after skating, candies, popcorn balls, how to understand your parents, how to stop a family quarrel, movies of social import, the management of high school proms, stories about friendships with boys, crushes on teachers, a department of poems and stories written by teen-agers—all this imparts in a rather homiletic vein the daily lesson of growth and character-building.
Pleasures here are wholesome, groupy (“Get your gang together”) projects, requiring everybody’s cooperation. Thoughtfulness is the motto. The difficulty of being both good and popular, and the tension between the two aims (the great crux of choice for adolescence), are the staple matter of the fiction; every boy hero or girl heroine has a bitter pill to swallow in the ending. The same old-fashioned moral principles are brought to bear on fashion and cooking. The little cook in Seventeen is not encouraged, à la Mademoiselle, to think she can make “high drama” out of a Drake’s Cake and a pudding mix; she starts her party biscuits or her cake with fresh eggs, fresh butter, and sifted flour. Her first grown-up jewelry is not an “important-looking” chunk of glass but a modest gold safety pin or, if she is lucky and has an uncle who can give it to her for graduation, a simple gold wrist watch.
And in Seventeen, surprisingly, the fashions, while inexpensive, have a more mundane look than Mademoiselle’s dresses, which tend to be junky—short-waisted, cute, with too many tucks, pleats, belts, and collars for the money. The Seventeen date dress is not very different from the “young fashions” in Harper’s Bazaar. It has been chosen to give its wearer a little air of style and maturity, on the same principle that an actor playing a drunk tries, not to stagger, but to walk straight. The artifice of youth in the Mademoiselle fashions betrays the very thing it is meant to cover—cheapness—and the little short bobbing jackets and boleros and dirndls become a sort of class uniform of the office worker, an assent to permanent juniority as a form of second-class citizenship, on the drugstore stool.
In the upper fashion world, the notion of fashion as fun acquires a delicate savor. The amusing, the witty, the delicious (“a deliciously oversized stole”) evoke a pastoral atmosphere, a Louis Seize scene where the queen is in the dairy and pauperdom is Arcadia. The whim, piquant or costly, defines the personality: try (Harper’s Bazaar) having everything slip-covered in pale Irish linen, including the typewriter and the bird cage; and “just for the fun of it, black with one white glove.” The idea of spending as thrift, lately coined by Vogue, implies the pastoral opposite of thrift as the gayest extravagance. “There is the good handbag. The pairs of good shoes. ... The wealth-to-spare look of rich and lean clothes together.” A “timeless” gold cross made from old family stones, and seventy-dollar shoes are proposed under the heading “Economical Extravagances.” “And upkeep, extravagantly good, is the ultimate economy. Examples: having your books with fine bindings oiled by an expert every year or having your wooden shoe-trees made to order. ... And purely for pleasure: flowers, silver, and the price of keeping it polished; an Afghan hound, the collection, from stamps to butterflies, to Coalport cabbages, that you, or we, skimp for rather than do without.”
The fabrication here of a democratic snobbery, a snobbery for everyone, is Vogue’s answer to the tumbrils of Truman. The trend of the times is resolutely reckoned with: today “the smaller collectors who have only one Giorgione” buy at Knoedler’s Gallery, just as Mellon used to do. As John Jacob Astor III said, “A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich.” (What a delicious sow’s ear, my dear, where did you get it? The small collection, the little evening imply the intimate and the choice, as well as the tiniest pinch of necessity. Little hats, little furs, tiny waists—Vogue and the Bazaar are wriggling with them; in the old days hats were small. And as some images of size contract or cuddle (“Exciting too the tight skull of a hat with no hair showing”; “the sharp, small, polished head”), others stretch to wrap and protect: enormous, huge, immense—“a colossal muff,” “vast” sleeves; how to have enormous eyes. By these semantic devices the reader is made to feel small, frail and valuable. The vocabulary has become extremely tactile and sensuous, the caress of fine fabrics and workmanship being replaced by the caress of prose.
The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere. “An outrageous amount of S.A.” is promised by a new makeup; a bow is a “shameless piece of flattery.” A dress is no longer low-cut but bare. The diction is full of movement: “hair swept all to one side and just one enormous earring on the bare side.” A waist rises from a skirt “like the stem of a flower.” Images from sport and machinery (team, spark) give this murmurous romanticism a down-to-business, American twang and heighten the kinetic effect. “First a small shopping expedition. ... Then give your mind a good going-over, stiffen it with some well-starched prose; apply a gloss of poetry, two coats at least.”
The bugaboo of getting in a rut, of letting your mind, your figure, or your wardrobe become habit-ridden and middle-aged, is conjured up with a terrible seriousness by all fashion magazines and most vividly of all by Harper’s Bazaar, which sees culture as a vital agent in the general toning-up process, tries to observe unifying trends and to relate a revival of interest in Scott Fitzgerald to Carol Channing and the cloche hat, and is the victim of its own orderliness in collating a mode to a movement.
Literature and the arts, in the middle and upper fashion magazines, are offered as a tonic to the flabby personality, a tonic frequently scented with the musky odor of Tabu or My Sin. The fiction published by Harper’s Bazaar (Vogue does not print stories), to be conned by suburban ladies under the drier, belongs almost exclusively to the mannerist or decadent school of American writing. Truman Capote, Edita Morris, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers—what these writers have in common, beyond a lack of matter and a consequent leukemia of treatment (taken by the Bazaar editors to be the very essence of art), is a potpourri of fleurs de mal, a preoccupation with the décor of sorrow, sexual aberration, insanity, and cruelty, a tasteful arrangement of the bric-a-brac of pathology around the whatnot of a central symbol. This fashionable genre of literary story is published in good faith by the Bazaar, with a positive glow, in fact, of high-minded, disinterested evangelism. The editors, to do them justice, are as honestly elated by the discovery of a new decadent talent as by the announcement of a new silhouette, a new coiffure, a new young designer.
For both Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, the regular discovery of younger and younger authors, of newer and newer painters, is a rather recent development and a concession to democratic principle. Society people do not read, and are not interested (ask a modern dealer) in any painters later than the Impressionists. (The theatre is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner.) A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class: It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world. It is for them and for their financial inferiors, students of interior decorating or the dance, bookstore clerks, models, assistant buyers and advertising copywriters, that photographs of Picasso drawing with a ray of light, reproductions of paintings by De Kooning or Baziotes, stories by Carson McCullers, Peggy Bennett, or Speed Lamkin have moment. For all those engaged in competition for status, the surge of a new name forward anywhere, in any field, in astrophysics even, or medicine, is of intense personal reference and concern. Any movement in the social body, any displacement, is felt at once by every mobile member of the organism as relating to his own case, and the inside knowledge of these distant events gives poise and assurance—hence the relevance of the yearly awards given by Mademoiselle and other fashion magazines for achievement in science, medicine, human relations, and the like.
A writer for Mademoiselle expresses the position of those on the lower rung of the ladder very clearly when she tells about how exciting it is to live in Washington, and adduces as an example the fact that her husband, Bob, once rode on a plane with the U.S. special representative to Israel and another time “bumped into Henry Wallace and General Vaughan coming out of the White House the day Wallace had his farewell row with the President.” Here the sense of being close to important events (itself vicarious) passes from the husband to the author to the reader. It is three removes off. What she likes about a certain Washington couple, she continues, is “that they always have interesting people around them, kicking around interesting ideas.” And of her friends, in general, “What really roots them to the spot is that the work they do has intrinsic, social meaning.” The concluding phrase, with its queer use of the comma, suggests that the intrinsic and the social are distinct and antithetical properties. But from the context it is plain that work that has intrinsic, comma, social meaning is work that is close to the big, busy, important things.
What has happened, in the course of twenty years, is that culture and even political liberalism have been converted by the mass-fashion mind, with its competitive bias, into a sort of Beaux Arts Ball. “A literary and artistic renaissance is what they’re talking about over coffee at the Francis Scott Key, Martinis at the Press Club. ... The Phillips Gallery ... pace-sets with frequent shows of important contemporary artists, photographers. ... At Whyte’s Bookshop and Gallery ... the important draw is. ...” The idea that it’s smart to be in step, to be liberal or avant-garde, is conveyed through the name-dropping of a Leo Lerman in Mademoiselle. To allude negligently to Kafka, Yeats, Proust, Stendhal, or St. John of the Cross in a tone of of-course-you-know-them is canonical procedure for Mademoiselle contributors, whatever the topic in hand, while the minor name here (Capote, Buechner, Tennessee Williams, Vidal) has the cachet of the little evening, the little hat, the little fur. The conception of a mass initiate involves an assembly-line production of minority objects of virtu, and is producing a new conformity altogether dominated by the mode, in which late Beethoven, boogie-woogie, the UN, Buechner, Capote, FEPC, and The Cocktail Party are all equally important names to be spent. Contrary to the practice in high society, the recherché is more prized than the known great, and Shakespeare is a virtually worthless counter, which Mrs. Astor never was.
The conspicuous mass display of the bibelots of a curio culture is the promotional secret of Flair, the new Cowles magazine, with its first-naming of the New Bohemians, “Carson,” “Truman,” and “Tennessee,” and its splashy collage of democrats and decadents—Margaret Mead and Salvador Dali, Simone de Beauvoir and Mme. Pompadour, Jean Genet and W. H. Auden, Thomas Jefferson and Angus Wilson, Barbara Ward and Franco Spain, Leonor Fini and the Middleburg Hunt, Cocteau and Mauriac. As an instrument of mass snobbery, this remarkable magazine, dedicated simply to the personal cult of its editress, to the fetichism of the flower (Fleur Cowles, Flair, a single rose), outdistances all its competitors in the audacity of its conception. It is a leap into the Orwellian future, a magazine without contest or point of view beyond its proclamation of itself, one hundred and twenty pages of sheer presentation, a journalistic mirage. The principle of the peep show or illusion utilized in the cutouts, where the eye is led inward to a false perspective of depth, is the trick of the entire enterprise. The articles, in fact, seem meant not to be read but inhaled like a whiff of scent from the mystic rose at the center (flair, through Old French, from fragrare, to emit an odor: an instinctive power of discriminating or discerning). Nobody, one imagines, has read them, not even their authors: grammatical sentences are arranged around a vanishing point of meaning. Yet already, in the very first, quite androgyne number, an ectoplasmic feminine you is materialized, to whom a fashion editor’s voice speaks in tones of assured divination: “Fashion is Personal. ... Seven silhouettes chosen from wide possibilities, not because they are extreme high fashion, but because they are silhouettes you might claim. ...” There follow seven dresses in the current high fashion.
The cynicism and effrontery of this surpass anything previously tried out in journalism. And yet Vogue immediately fell into line with its own warm defense of the reader against fashion’s tyranny. “Ignore the exquisite exaggerations of fashion drawings” when trying to determine the weight that is right for you; study yourself, know yourself, wear what is timelessly yours. Copy courageous Mrs. Carroll Carstairs, who wears the same beanies every year regardless of the milliners; or Pauline Potter, who carries the same custom-made suede handbag suspended from a jeweler’s gold chain.” To an experienced reader, this doctrine is merely a 1950 adaptation of the old adage about knowing your own type, a text that generally prefaces the suggestion that the reader should go out and spend a great deal of money on some item of quality merchandise. But beyond the attempt to push quality goods during a buying recession like the recent one, or to dodge responsibility for an unpopular mode (this year’s sheaths and cloches are widely unbecoming), there appears to be some periodic feminine compulsion on the editresses’ part to strike a suffragette attitude toward the merchants whose products are their livelihood, to ally themselves in a gush with their readers, who are seen temporarily as their “real” friends.
And as one descends to a lower level of the fashion structure, to Glamour (Condé Nast) and Charm (Street and Smith), one finds a more genuine solicitude for the reader and her problems. The pain of being a BG (Business Girl), the envy of superiors, self-consciousness, awkwardness, loneliness, sexual fears, timid friendliness to the Boss, endless evenings with the mirror and the tweezers, desperate Saturday social strivings (“Give a party and ask everyone you know”), the struggle to achieve any identity in the dead cubbyhole of office life, this mass misery, as of a perpetual humiliating menstrual period, is patently present to the editors, who strive against it with good advice, cheeriness, forced volubility, a psychiatric nurse’s briskness, so that the reiterated “Be natural,” “Be yourself,” “Smile,” “Your good points are you too” (Mademoiselle), have a therapeutic justification.
A characteristic running feature in Glamour and Charm is a newsy letter from the editors, date-lined London, Paris, New York, or Rome, a letter back home full of gossip and family jokes, the sort of letter one writes to a shut-in. The vicarious here is carried to its furthest extreme: the editors live out for the readers a junketing, busy life in which the readers, admittedly, will share only by mail—quite a different thing from the Mademoiselle Everygirl projection. The delegation of experience from reader to editor is channeled through a committee of typical (Charm) or outstanding (Glamour) business girls—the Charm Advisory Committee, the Glamour Career Counselors—selected from all over the country, who are polled from time to time on problems of special interest and who not only keep the editors in touch with the desires of the readers but pass on, through the editors, their own superior know-how to the lowest members of the caste.
A publication of Street and Smith, Charm has a more vulgar tone than Glamour, which belongs to the Vogue chain. Its circulation, considerably smaller than Glamour’s, larger than Mademoiselle’s, seems drawn preponderantly from the West and the South, backward fashion areas, while Glamour’s public is Eastern or urban, the differences being sharpest in the vicinity of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Los Angeles. Glamour’s dresses are more expensive than Charm’s. It is conscious of Paris, Italy, and London, and will illustrate, in the front of the magazine, the work of Italian craftsmen and French designers for their own sake, as objects of beauty and wonder. As in the old Vogue, the cultivation of taste, the development of a fashion sensibility which impersonally delights in the finely made and the rare, are, at least in part, the editorial purpose.
A letter from Glamour’s editor to the readers in last year’s Christmas number, suggesting that the American girl lives too much on dreams and illusions and proposing impersonal goals, has the gently remonstrative seriousness of a young woman dean exhorting her alumnae. Maturity and dignity are valued. Photographs of secretaries of well-known persons, photographs of successful women who began as secretaries, a history of the secretarial profession emphasize the dignity of office work and gives it status through history and a tradition. Serenity in work (“Why I Like My Job”—a contest) and at home are stressed to the point where this itself becomes an aristocratic illusion: an article called “These Gracious Customs” showing the cocktail party with hunt-breakfast silver; the inevitable wedding pictures with champagne, striped trousers, and a butler. Yet the general attitude of Glamour is sensible, without much side, and in its own terms idealistic, the eye being directed less downward toward the immediate bargain counter than inward toward self-examination and outward toward the great cities and fine artisans of the world.
With Charm, on the other hand, the nadir of the personal is reached: the Business Girl is greeted at her lowest common denominator. The editor becomes “Your Ed,” the fun-fabulous-wonderful-sensational shriek (“Learn to make one fabulous dish. ... Give your earrings a new locale. ... Carry an umbrella as a costume adjunct. ... DARE TO DO IT”), addressed to the insecure and the maladroit, echoes in a national hollowness of social failure and fear. A presumption of previous failure in the reader, failure with men, with friends, failure in schoolwork, is the foundation of the average feature: “This Little Girl Never Had Any Fun,” “Stood Up.”
A lead article on “Smiles” in the January issue points to the Roosevelt smile, the Mona Lisa smile, the Betty Grable smile, the Jolson smile, the Dietrich smile: “... people in the public eye have never underestimated the power of a smile: it’s odd that you have so often overlooked it. ... Though smiling is nicer as a spontaneous thing, you might, just in the nature of an experiment, start smiling as a conscious thing. Smile at your family ... your husband ... your employer ... your young man. Smile deliberately at some point in an argument ... at a break in the conversation. ... Smile a while in front of your mirror.” The article finishes characteristically with some hints about dentifrices and the art of toothbrushing. In another feature by the same author, the natural attractions of the bride-to-be are so despaired of that she is advised to apply a lip-coloring base before going to bed, spray the room with “fragrance,” and even “steal” a sachet under the pillow.
A preoccupation with deodorants and “personal hygiene” becomes more and more noticeable as the economic scale is descended. Social failure is ascribed to a lack of “fastidiousness,” a lower-middle-class fear that first reveals itself in Mademoiselle, where the likelihood of giving “offense” is associated with the male sex. “It’s the rare man ... who isn’t considerably more attractive when he uses some [toilet water or cologne].” “A consistently fastidious, scrubby male is mighty nice to have around the house. ... If he doesn’t mind tomorrow’s garlic and you do, get him a bottle of the leaf-fresh mouth wash that all men love on first gargle. If he uses a deodorant—and more men could—keep his brand on hand. If he doesn’t, put a squeeze-spray version where he’ll see it—it will appeal to a man’s mechanical instinct.”
The bridal number of Charm carries a feature (“His and Hers”) on bathroom etiquette, showing pictures of a man and woman gargling, shaving, creaming, brushing teeth, putting powder between the toes against athlete’s foot, using a deodorant (male); the bathroom is called the lavabo. In the same number, a marriage article, “The Importance of Not Being Prudish,” contains the following advice: “You’ll also be a silly prude if you squeak like a mouse when he, thoughtlessly, walks into the bedroom without knocking and finds you standing in your bra and panties. Don’t make like September Morn. Respecting your natural modesty, he’ll probably say he’s sorry, walk backward through the door. ... (He should have knocked ...).” And another feature, “Beauty Steps to the Altar,” includes two “Secret Steps”; crayons to color your gray hair give a “natural, plausible performance. ... And remember there are very good preparations that make a secret of scars and blemishes.”
Thus, at the lowest fashion level, a most painful illusionism becomes the only recipe for success. Admiration and compliments provide momentarily the sense of well-being which, for the woman of fashion of the upper level, is an exhalation of the stuffs and stays that hold her superb and erect as in a vase of workmanship. For the reader of Charm it is her very self that is the artifact, an artifact which must be maintained, night and day, in the close quarters of marriage, brought to higher sparkle for party evenings with the gang (“Your quips were a tearing success; his gags killed ’em”), at the office, in the subway (“Smile”). The continued tribute to be extorted from others, which the Charm policy promises its untouchables, if only they will follow directions, is laid down as an American right, to be fought for, creamed for, depilated and massaged for—more than that, as duty, with ostracism threatened for slackers. Every woman, says Glamour categorically, can be fifty per cent more beautiful. It is the rigorous language of the factory in which new production goals are set yearly, which must not only be met but exceeded. “Mirror, mirror on the wall ...?” begs the reader. “You,” answers the editor, “if you did your exercises, were the prettiest girl in the Republic.”