Forming a city’s sense of style
We were there when brassieres were coming into vogue and flappers were shocking society
In the old days, layout artists at The Vancouver Sun would paint “whiteout” around the important person in a photo, so the image could be easily cropped out of the larger picture. The downside of this was that often some poor sap was covered by whiteout and erased from the photo. A classic example is Ray Allan’s shot of The Sun’s vivacious fashion editor Marie Moreau at the 1960 Junior League ball, the “crowning society fete of the season.” Marie looks radiant in a strapless white evening gown and elbow- length gloves. Her smile seems to have hypnotized an old guy in a coat and tails, who has not only lost part of his left arm to whiteout, but also has a big X written across his face. Marie’s dumbstruck admirer isn’t just a regular Joe, it’s British Columbia’s lieutenant- governor, Maj.Gen. G. R. Pearkes. Which gives you some idea of the star quality, and importance, of Marie Moreau in The
Vancouver Sun in the 1950s and ’ 60s. But then, the fashion pages have always been an important part of the paper. A full page in the premier edition of the paper on Feb. 12, 1912, was dedicated to fashion, featuring columns like The Sun’s Daily Fashion Hint From Paris, London and New York, My Lady’s Realm, and My Favourite Name ( the first was Anna).
Naturally, there were also ads by Vancouver’s most stylish retailers. Gordon Drysdale Ltd. had just received a fresh shipment of DeBevoise brassieres.
“Worn over the corset just like a corset cover and shaped to give lines of unusual grace,” read the ad.
“With low bust corsets now in vogue the brassiere is almost a necessity, and for corsets with high busts the garment is also essential. The brassiere is a great figure- producer and therefore should be of interest to a great number of women.”
In the 1920s, The Sun ran a syndicated column by “Lucille,” Lady Duff Gordon, a London designer The Sun proclaimed “the foremost creator of fashions in the world.” It also featured special sections such as
Furry Fashions for Fall, an eight- page special on Sunday, Sept. 11, 1921.
The cover featured a model in “lovely” evening wraps of Russian ermine and mink. An ad for Famous clothiers at 626 West Hastings said coats and wraps like this were selling for $ 29.50 to $ 65.
You could also pick up a wrap at Madam Mathilde at 104 West Hastings, across from Woodward’s. “Stylish fall shoes” could be had at the American Boot Shop, 541 Granville, and fine silks were available at Japanese retailers like Mikado, Yamato Silks, The Nikko and Toyo.
These high- end Japanese retailers weren’t in Japantown, they were all on Granville Street, the home of high fashion.
Some of the old stories are a hoot.
The Sept. 9, 1921, Sun carried an illustration of a Roaring Twenties “flapper” sitting on a couch, beside the question “Think she’s pretty?” Beneath the illustration is the headline “Mothers to Blame for Daring Stunts of Flappers.”
“There is a wave of something sweeping the earth,” wrote Antoinette Donnelly. “I know not what to call it, [ but it has] unquestionably dragged a lot of our young maids into a maelstrom of daredevilry, of sophistication, which belongs not to their generation nor to their years nor to any world but the one they labelled ‘ underworld.’”
Marie Moreau would have been a great flapper, but she was born a little too late. She grew up in Quebec and California, but came to B. C. in 1938, where she worked as fashion coordinator at the Hudson Bay Co. In 1946, she became the fashion editor of the Vancouver Province, and in 1954 The Sun stole her away.
“Glamorous Marie Moreau will advise Sun readers,” trumpeted a story announcing the switch. “Main emphasis of the column, the handsome, flashing-eyed editor says, will be an atmosphere of intimacy, highlighted by personal letters and a sense of ‘ Let’s get right down to it and see what we can do for your figure, ma’am — you’re a housewife with a bit too much here and there, not a N’Yawk society belle.’”
The Sun played its columnists as stars in the 1950s, and the beautiful Moreau’s photo was constantly in the paper.
The greatest of all Marie Moreau photos is a colour shot of her flipping pancakes in The Sun’s test kitchen. Naturally, she’s wearing a pearl necklace while cooking. She’s also flashing a million- watt smile watching the pancake flip in mid- air above an immaculate white frying pan. The scene looks almost too perfect, and is — if you look closely, the pancake is suspended on a fishing line.
When columnist Jack Scott became the editor of the paper in 1959, he raised eyebrows by sending Moreau to Cuba to cover the Cuban Revolution.
The cover of The Sun on Jan. 28 features a photo of a smiling Moreau running her hand up the gun barrel of a bearded Cuban revolutionary. “Marie Watches as Cubans Demand a Death for a Death” blared the headline.
A week later, Moreau hit the jackpot when she met Fidel Castro. The Feb. 5 Sun featured a front- page photo of a smiling Fidel checking out the radiant Marie. Evidently, he liked what he saw: Castro invited Marie “to go back to his revolutionary headquarters with him.”
“Castro is a handsome man, with a magnetic personality,” she wrote.
“He is tall for a Cuban, being well over six feet. His complexion, what you can see of it above his thick black beard, is a luminous olive colour. A highbridged Grecian nose gives his face a classical look. Cubans say he looks like a saint. I think he looks what he is, a completely dedicated revolutionary leader. He is 32 and more handsome than his pictures show him.
“In case the feminine readers get an idea Castro is a cross between Stewart Granger and the sheriff of Cochise County, let me say this rebel leader is more like a Genghis Khan. His beard is straggly and unkempt. He wears a sweaty shirt that looks as though he hadn’t changed it since the revolution began, and his fingernails are grimy.”
Moreau’s Cuban reports earned her a Canadian Women’s Press Club prize when she got back to Canada. Then the Toronto Star lured her back east to become its fashion writer.
The Sun continued to have a strong fashion section under writer/ editors like Diana Ricardo and Virginia Leeming. They were often sent to New York or Paris to cover the latest trends, but sadly, never got a chance to interview any bearded revolutionaries with grimy fingernails.
The Sun’s library and archives is filled with examples of the photo shoots they directed, however. You could do a book on the 1960s shoots alone.
There are some wonderful George Diack photos of two models partying in front of a totem pole in Stanley Park in 1966. The same year, Danny Scott photographed a woman in a “nude- look fashion dress.” Dave Buchan liked a tipple, so he was the natural choice to shoot a New Year’s Eve fashion photo session of some partiers enjoying some libation.
You could also put out a book on the colour photos taken by The Sun’s photographers in the 1950s. The photos that were taken on slides have an incredibly rich, vibrant quality, like one of those 1950s movie epics in Technicolor.
A good example is a photo of a pair of ski bunnies at the Grouse Mountain Chalet in 1953. Photographer Henry Tregillas captured a brunette in fire- red ski pants and a red andwhite checked ski sweater, plus a blond in sky- blue pants and a powder blue sweater.
The vibrancy of their colourful attire really comes out against the grey stone of the chalet’s fireplace and the rich log walls.
It’s staged and commercial, but six decades later is so beautifully done, it’s art.