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

Life created a frequent and important presence for fashion in its pages. In fact, fashion was arguably the essential subject addressed with constancy to women in the pages of Life, certainly for the years from the Dior "New 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: the 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 the 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 the years in question. Perhaps most surprising to us is the importance of fashion, independent of models and celebrities. For example, the cover story of the February 15, 1954, issue is "Should She Change Her Italian Hairdo?" Without the identification of a model or actress, as we would expect in the 1980s or 1990s on a popular magazine or on a fashion magazine, the magazine is sufficiently resolved to represent its story in relative anonymity, suggesting that this image is rather more in the tradition of the magazines of illustrated story-telling covers, rather than the 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 the cover will not "sell" the issue and will not interest male readers. That a style storywithout the celebrities of a Hollywood best-and worst-dressed list-would command the cover of this issue and of others suggests the considerable place that fashion held in the visual, pictorial, and glamour conception of Life. Alternatively, one looks at a story from the March 25, 1946, issue that chronicles the 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 the model's .trade." Smartly dressed, Carlson is clearly identified as a working woman and the article finds that her life is not all glamour, but is demanding work. It is, in fact, this ethic that pervades the coverage of fashion and style in Life disproving and demythologizing the supposed glamour of fashion. Always, there is a pragmatic aspect whether the laborious work that is shown in process in the workrooms of Paris, the bustling workaday world of Seventh Avenue, or even the 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 the frothiest images of the 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 the third person in the room is our signal to the arduousness of this task, the 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 the deprivations of Paris into 1946. One may compare this image with the famous photograph, not in Life though of its ethos, by Horst of Gertrude Stein in the House of Pierre Balmain in 1946, with author and lecturer Rosamond Bernier and illustrator Eric. …