Style from Paris, Reality from America: Fashion in Life Magazine, 1947–1963

Abstract

Life created a frequent and important presence for fashion in its pages. In fact, fashion was arguably essential subject addressed with constancy to women in pages of Life, certainly for years from Dior Look of 1947 through 1963 with Jacqueline Kennedy as First Lady. In those years, in those influential pages, a new epoch of fashion was formed: post-War fashion ideas of leadership concepts and immense personal freedom and expression, fashion as a system, and women's lives as necessary condition for fashion. Distinctively, Life offered an acquaintance with authority, in this instance traditional hegemony of French couture, but also rallied support for American sportswear, beachwear, and casual styles. If this seems a contradiction in bringing high fashion in enthusiastic reports from Paris and a level of reality in showing modestly priced and autonomous American fashion, Life articulated a manner of addressing fashion that seems foresighted in many ways and perhaps even more perspicacious than most fashion magazines of its time or our time. Fashion and style were a frequent subject of Life in years in question. Perhaps most surprising to us is importance of fashion, independent of models and celebrities. For example, cover story of February 15, 1954, issue is Should She Change Her Italian Hairdo? Without identification of a model or actress, as we would expect in 1980s or 1990s on a popular magazine or on a fashion magazine, magazine is sufficiently resolved to represent its story in relative anonymity, suggesting that this image is rather more in tradition of magazines of illustrated story-telling covers, rather than portrait covers that characterize other magazines. Moreover, we probably could not imagine this cover on a contemporary magazine in part because of our sophisticated demographic approaches, insisting that a woman's story on cover will not sell issue and will not interest male readers. That a style storywithout celebrities of a Hollywood best-and worst-dressed list-would command cover of this issue and of others suggests considerable place that fashion held in visual, pictorial, and glamour conception of Life. Alternatively, one looks at a story from March 25, 1946, issue that chronicles life of a working model in New York City. With an air that seems almost an O'Henry hero more than Cindy Crawford, we see Lily Carlson walking to work with her hatbox, identified as the symbol of model's .trade. Smartly dressed, Carlson is clearly identified as a working woman and article finds that her life is not all glamour, but is demanding work. It is, in fact, this ethic that pervades coverage of fashion and style in Life disproving and demythologizing supposed glamour of fashion. Always, there is a pragmatic aspect whether laborious work that is shown in process in workrooms of Paris, bustling workaday world of Seventh Avenue, or even woman's work of modelling now taken to be a tough job, not just a privilege of beauty. In an important way, it abjured a fatuous fashion and sought a reasoned, lifestyle-driven functional style. The reason and reality that Life attributes to fashion can also be seen in a famous Nina Leen photograph published April 1, 1946. Paris designer Jacques Fath, who created some of frothiest images of 1940s and 1950s, is here seen in workmanly perfectionism. He makes adjustments on a dress being modelled by his wife Genevieve. The floor polisher whom we see as third person in room is our signal to arduousness of this task, acknowledgement that all of this is toil and not a mere voila of fashion exuberance. We can only imagine that this room was probably unheated, given deprivations of Paris into 1946. One may compare this image with famous photograph, not in Life though of its ethos, by Horst of Gertrude Stein in House of Pierre Balmain in 1946, with author and lecturer Rosamond Bernier and illustrator Eric. …