 |
| Illustrated by Georges Lepape, Vogue, February 1, 1925 |
Introduction
Moving into the 20th century, women’s beauty was transformed by many key inventions including the silver glass mirror, “daguerreotype” photographic process, and the lightbulb. By 1900 women were able to see themselves with greater visual clarity than ever before, at lower costs than ever before, through the factory produced mirror and lens, and lit by the factory produced lightbulb. Early light bulbs were described as giving off an extremely unflattering glow, and many old world hostesses of the Gilded Age refused to use them on the grounds that their guests would look their worst under such revealing rays. At the same time the women of the era were bombarded with images of other women, put out by white collar workers employed in the rapidly growing field of advertising. It is no surprise that moving into the 1920s the markets for skincare, makeup, and haircare products increased exponentially.
Adolescence as an era of life was first described by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and after being defined the societal influence of the adolescent grew steadily. By the 1920s, youth culture was dominating popular culture, particularly through the youth-dominated field of athletics, and women began to desire flat, adolescent figures and tan, flushed skin. As a result anti-aging creams and lotions, as well as exercises and garments designed to flatten the figure, abounded. Below are six women’s beauty trends which originated during this era dominated by the young and the masses. While the popularity of these trends spread across a large segment of society, those participating were primarily white middle- and upper-class society. Some are still popular today, while some have faded into obscurity.
Adolescence as an era of life was first described by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and after being defined the societal influence of the adolescent grew steadily. By the 1920s, youth culture was dominating popular culture, particularly through the youth-dominated field of athletics, and women began to desire flat, adolescent figures and tan, flushed skin. As a result anti-aging creams and lotions, as well as exercises and garments designed to flatten the figure, abounded. Below are six women’s beauty trends which originated during this era dominated by the young and the masses. While the popularity of these trends spread across a large segment of society, those participating were primarily white middle- and upper-class society. Some are still popular today, while some have faded into obscurity.
Tanned Skin
 |
| Ruth Mills (far right) sporting a veil to protect herself from the sun. |
As the legend goes, tanned skin was popularized in the 1920s by Gabrielle (or Coco) Chanel, who accidentally became burnt while out on the Riviera with her fashionable friends. Chanel was a competent self-mythologizer, but it seems much more likely that the vogue for tanned skin, although quickly taken up by her set, was largely a result of a general societal dispensation during the decade towards} the new temporal category of leisure which I cover in my previous blog post.
 |
| Coco Chanel sporting one of the tans which she championed as part of her larger interest in the aesthetics of the French Riviera. |
"Egyptian" Inspired Eye Makeup
 |
| The face of a sarcophagus in the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb, upon which heavy kohl outlines the eyes. |
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the greatest influencers when it came to 1920s trends was not a designer of the era, but rather the 1922 raiding of Egyptian King Tutankhamun’s tomb by British archeologists. The sacking of the boy-king’s final resting place came at a time when the newspaper industry was growing by leaps and bounds, and it was an extraordinarily well publicized and well documented event. It also coincided with the time when large nations such as Britain and France forcefully took control of the pieces of the Ottoman Empire after the termination WWI. Returning soldiers brought Ottoman products back to London and Paris, which had been inundated with fleeing Russian aristocrats after the revolution of the late 1910s and early 1920s. Paris in particular had been taken in completely by the storm which was Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, a production which glorified all things eastern, not restricting itself to traditional Russian culture but instead also wallowing in representations of Greco-Egyptian culture (in Cleopatra), Turkish culture (in Le Corsaire), Indian culture (in La Bayadere), and Arabian culture (in Scheherazade). This fantasy had tangible effects on the cosmetics of the day; women began to paint their faces in imitation of the ancient Egyptians use of Kohl as it was depicted in the paintings adorning their tombs, the prototype for what today is popular as the cat eye or smoky eye look.
 |
| A 1929 beauty guide published by Armand Cosmetics showcased different popular looks that customers could try. One such look was the 'Cleopatra,' based off the ancient monarch of the same name. |
X-ray Beauty
Discovered by the Bavarian physicist Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895, X-rays influenced more than just medical procedures. The X-ray machine itself was used for hair removal in the 1920s, while many of the youth obsessed consumers of the decade turned to radium based anti-aging products. These most often came in the form of facial creams and lotions, but also included a diverse range of soaps, toothpastes, cosmetics, and hairstyling treatments. A 1918 ad for radiator toilet requisites (a radium-based beauty company) reads:
"An ever flowing fountain of Youth and Beauty has been discovered in the Energy Rays of Radium. When scientists discovered Radium they hardly dreamed that they had unearthed a revolutionary “Beauty Secret.” They know it now. Radium rays vitalize and energize all living tissue. This energy has been turned into Beauty’s aid. Requisite contains a definite quantity of actual radium."The creators of radium-based beauty products did their best to appeal to a culture which was increasingly obsessed with supposedly objective science, claiming that the glowing material could transfer its light and power into its user. Of course, this was not the case; although it remains unclear whether the levels of radium found in typical 1920s beauty products caused lasting harm to their users, radium based care had definitively fallen out of favor by the time of WWII.
 |
| Representatives for a radium-based beauty company hawking their wares at a trade show. |
Mechanical Haircare
 |
| A 1920s permanent wave machine producted by Icall in action, ca.1923. |
 |
| An ad for a radium based permanent hair treatment designed to support a permanent wave, ca. 1925, via Library of Congress |
Machines used to curl the hair were certainly not new to fashion into the 1920s. In fact, it was in the 1870s that Parisian hairdresser Marcel Grateau made waves (both literally and figuratively) with “The Marcel,” an applied wave technique which was voraciously used by the Gibson Girls (a group of late 19th and early 20th century beauties chronicled by the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson.) However, in the 1920s, modern girls, often referred to as flappers or garconnes, used Grateau’s techniques (by then updated by the Swiss hairdresser Charles Nestle) in order to style the bobs which were rapidly de riguer among the women of their set. The marcel wave and short flapperesque hairstyles were also popular with black women, especially after entertainer Josephine Baker sported a slicked down pixie cut, pin curls, and waves. Baker even sold her own line of hair pomade called Bakerfix so other women could copy her style.
 |
| Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), known by many as the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance," sports the marcel wave during her teenage years in 1926. |
In an issue of Vogue published during the decade, Dorothy Parker writes of her decision to get a permanent wave that: “Nature had seen fit to curse me with straight hair, but you have to put Nature in her place every now and then.” Describing the space in which the procedure occurred, Parker tells her reader that:
"The mysterious room was a bleak, bare place, just four blank walls, a monotonous floor, and an unaspiring ceiling. In the very middle of the floor stood a chair, much like a dentist’s chair and just about as inviting. Directly above it, a strange machine hung from the ceiling—a mass of wires and coils and batteries, twisted and intermingled with diabolical ingenuity."The process of receiving a permanent wave (which could take up to six hours) is reported to be roughly as fun as the room in which Parker is placed. First, her hair is twisted above her head, then, a rough substance is applied to it, then, it is attached to the machine suspended from the ceiling, which pulls and heats it to the point that a fan must be used in order to cool the burning head of poor Parker. The results, however, are astonishing; Parker writes of the moment in which she first saw her newly curled hair that: “I know what heaven will be like, I experienced it in that moment. I was incoherent with joy.” Of course, this was not the only dangerous haircare machine of the decade: it was during the 1920s that hair dryers for the home emerged within the mass market, and a number of women were killed by the shocks of electricity that would occasionally emanate from these devices.
Painted and Rouged Knees
 |
| A 1920s tango case designed by Richard Hudnut Deauville featuring a compact for rouge embossed with a face in profile, a tube for lipstick, and a ring which would hook over. |
“To rouge or not to rouge” writes Hallie Erminie in The Complete Book of Etiquette with Social forms for All Ages and Occasions “is that even a question nowadays… when the daughter of the most exclusive family paints her face for her afternoon walk as did the soubrette of former years.” Erminie’s guide was published in 1926, and indeed by this time rouge was fairly ubiquitous among all classes. In fact, cosmetics as a whole had been destigmatized to such an extent that many women applied their makeup in public, using “tango cases” which were designed for emergency touchups. These tango cases were so dubbed because they were part of a flapper culture in which dress was designed for late nights spent dancing.
 |
| Flappers sporting the rolled down stockings, short skirts, and painted knees which were stylish among those who danced in the 1920s. |
In the 1920s over 100 dances were introduced to the United States for the first time, not the least of which was the tango. Rhythms began to surpass lyrics in musical import as the phonograph and radio increased in popularity and more composers began to write songs which were intended to be listened to rather than sung. By the middle of the decade, most fashionable restaurants contained a dance floor, and dancing was an expected part of going out. One particularly popular dance was the Charleston, a series of movements largely based on the Juba dance invented by enslaved Congolese men and women who were kidnapped and brought to Charleston, South Carolina. It involved a number of high kicks, and the women who danced wearing the newly shortened hemlines (which typically descended to somewhere between the knee and the middle of the calf) would regularly flash higher regions of their legs in a manner that was thought to be intensely alluring. To emphasize this gesture many began to rouge their knees. From this another trend was born which included not only the rouging but also the painting of knees—usually with either faces or figures.
 |
| A group of flappers flash their rouged knees while dancing the Charleston. |
Painted Nails
In the first few years of the 20th century, polishing one’s nails was an act not dissimilar to polishing one’s shoes, which required buffing paste and a chamois nail buffer. However, as the automobile became a popular status symbol, car designers began to experiment with high gloss paints. These were eventually applied not only to vehicles but also to fingernails, in what were the earliest modern nail polishes. Nail care became a rapidly expanding market, with the aspirational nail being almond shaped with white half-moons at the cuticle and white tips at the end. In fact, many chic young women began to push its boundaries past a simple coat of paint. Like the knees, the nails were soon being taken up by designs of figures and faces, in particular portraits by of the members social circle to which the girl in question belonged.
 |
| Three ads for the nail polish company Cutex published during the 1920s |
Not surprisingly, some of these 1920s beauty trends are no longer with us. Fortunately, radium-based beauty products are a thing of the past. Less fortunately (at least in my opinion) so are painted knees. However tanned skin, Egyptian inspired eye makeup, hair care machinery, and painted nails continue to live on in modern manifestations including spray tans and tanning booths, cat eye and smoky eye makeup, hair straighteners and curlers and driers, and acrylic and gel nails. Who knew that so many of the most popular treatments of the 2020s originated 100 years ago!
Bibliography:
Sources from the MET Library
The Artifice of Beauty, Sally Pointier, The History Press, Cheltenham, May 1 2005,
Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle Between 1922 and 1943, Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari, Daminai, Bologna, October 31 2009
Sources from the Bard College Library
Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, Volume 4: The Twentieth Century to Today, Edited by Peter McNeil, 2009, Oxford, Berg (Chapter 21: Vionnet & Classicism, by Rebecca Arnold and Chapter 22: Paul Poiret’s Minaret Style: Originality, Reproduction, and Art in Fashion)
20th Century Fashion by Valarie Mendes and Amy de la Haye, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1999 (Chapter 2: La Garconne and the New Simplicity)
Sources from the Staatsburgh Library
Photograph of Ruth Mills
Harper’s Bazaar, Editors of Harper’s Bazaar, Hearst, New York City, 1919
Vogue Compendium
Found Online
https://www.messynessychic.com/2021/07/15/the-peculiar-flapper-fad-of-rouged-and-decorated-knees/
https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1920-1929/
https://www.vogue.com/article/from-the-archives-1920s-jazz-age-illustration
No comments:
Post a Comment