TODAY IN HISTORY
On March 26, 1874, publisher Condé Nast was born. A successful advertising executive for Collier’s, he introduced the concept of “class publications” or “lifestyle magazines.” While other publishers focused on circulation numbers, Nast targeted groups of readers by income level or common interest. Nast purchased Vogue in 1909 and House and Garden in 1913. In 1914, he introduced Vanity Fair. Each publication explored current trends in fashion, the arts, politics, and entertainment.
While few can afford the clothing displayed on the pages of Vogue, Americans traditionally uphold the right to dress as fashionably as possible. In his essay “Are Women Natural Aristocrats?,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalls a British minister’s wife who prescribed plain dress for the “lower classes.” He contrasts her view with the
American position on personal adornment:
The American clergyman and clergyman’s wife who should even “recommend” such a costume to a schoolmistress, church-singer, or Sundayschool girl,-to say nothing of the rest of the “lower orders,”-would soon find themselves without teachers, without pupils, without a choir, and probably without a parish. The Sunday bonnet of the Irish damsel is only the symbol of a very proper effort to obtain her share of all social advantages. Long may those ribbons wave!
Traditionally, maintaining a stylish appearance is a burden that falls more heavily on women. Writing to her future husband, Alexander Graham Bell in 1877, Mabel Hubbard jested:
You gentlemen have no idea how much trouble and weariness it costs only to get the material for the dresses you so much admire. I had no idea how much the bright dresses of women relieve our sombre streets. We went down to the part of the city devoted exclusively to the men, where women never come, and such a shabby dull looking affairs the men were. I should think they would get sick of their own society.
As Mabel Hubbard noted, in our culture the female tends to be a more colorful dresser than the male. Yet, men hardly ignore the latest styles.
Interviewed by WPA writer W. W. Dixon in 1940, Ella E. Gooding and Alice Buchanan Walker had both positive and negative things to say about the styles of their youth:
The old hoop skirt was before our day, but corsets and bustles were worn. White was the prevailing color for hose, and we wore black shiny slippers with moderately high heels… The hair was worn high on the head, on a chignon. Earrings in the ears and gems in the hair were part of an evening dress…we were partial to the flat, wide-brimmed, leghorn hats. A wreath of flowers encircled the top of the brim and long streamers or bands of ribbon floated from the sides and could be tied under the chin. The winter hats were… trained with ostrich plumes and feathers. – Alice Buchanan Walker
When I arrived to the years of womanhood, the hoop skirt was passing out of style, and the bustle and tight long shirts were the vogue. The style lacked comfort, and the corsets were cruel and suffocating and actually injurious to the spirit and health of women and girls…the women arranged their hair with a chignon and looped it upon the top of the head. Young girls arranged their hair in ‘pig tails’ down the back and wore bangs over the forehead. The longer a woman’s hair, the more she had to be conceited about. – Ella E. Gooding
Source: Library of Congress