Athapascan Hupa woman from northwestern California, half-length portrait, standing, facing front, wearing shell headbands, necklace, and holding up two baskets. Photo by Edward S. Curtis, c1923. Library of Congress
Clara Bow In "IT" 1927, costume designed by Travis Banton
As I have said and repeat, my aim is for the legitimate. When a woman is required to dress for golf in a certain scene there is really no point in making her seem ready for a dance at the country club. When she is fitted with a bathing suit it should at least look suitable for water. Keeping this in mind,… I then muster new fashions which are the outcome of many trips to Paris, London and other points of fashion and modify and adjust them to the needs of the role.”
–Travis Banton quoted in Harrison, Helen. “Hollywood’s Own Revolt,” Screenland, March 1935, 33.
Edward Steichen (1819-1972), Fashion photograph, Vogue, 1930.
Western dress requires the body to give clothes meaning, and Western art had always accommodated itself to this need until the possibilities of abstract vision made themselves available to Western eyes, After that, clothes could aim at an ideal shape of their own, to which a body was truly subordinate — a box, a cylnder, a pyramid–and they could be shown to achieve it in a painting or a fashion illustration. Actual bodily shapes, always apt for distortion, now had the further task of turning themselves into detached patterns of their own mind’s eye. This is harder discipline than corseting and padding. Fashion photography, now advancing in the hands of masters such as Steichen and De Meyer, was able to aid the trend and offer black-and-white compositions of compelling authority — all the stronger because the camera now officially represented truth and such creations could not be considered distorted in the same way a drawing could. The ideal simplified shape of a sleek body was now not only indicated by the trend of abstract graphic design but confirmed on film. Since that time, women have had to be slender.”
I’m very pleased to announce that the winner of our “Pick your favorite German fashion icon” Facebook contest is reader Helen Steele – Congratulations!
Helen’s winning entry says: “I’d have to pick Brigitte Helm, the actress from Metropolis. As Maria/Robot she features in some of cinema’s most iconic images. She also wears a rather covetable collared dress in the film, very A/W 2011! Her own style encapsulated both the ‘vamp’ look of the silent cinema era and a softer, more elegant Art Deco style.”
Some readers will be familiar with my good friend, Katie Netherton, who has previously written guest book reviews for me elsewhere. Katie earned her Masters degree from New York University in Visual Culture: Costume Studies in 2002. Most recently she worked on the historic documentation project at the Brooklyn Museum and the Gordon Conway archive at The University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center.
Millicent Rogers in Charles James (Via Stirred, Straight Up, with a Twist Blog)
While we were at NYU, Katie researched and wrote a paper on Millicent Rogers and was in fact the one who brought this book to my attention almost a year ago. The Wall Street Journal recently discussed the book in an article titled “She Wore it Well.” It was also recently tauted in Women’s Wear Daily, who points out this tasty tidbit about Rogers: “When she moved to Hollywood in 1946, Rogers stayed at Valentino’s former house, Falcon’s Lair” and reminds us of her strong connection to the master American couturier, Charles James. The author of Searching for Beauty, Cherie Burns, who recently guest blogged for Huffington Post on the connection between Charles James and Millicent Rogers, has a number of upcoming events scheduled for September and October in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, including the Millicent Rogers Museum.
I’m very pleased to share with you Katie Netherton’s review:
Cherie Burns’ new book, “Searching for Beauty: The Life of Millicent Rogers,” explores the life of style icon Millicent Rogers, a fashion risk taker, art collector, jewelry maker, elegant decorator, and pinnacle of taste and flair. The author seeks to reveal Rogers’ character instead of strictly talking about her style and fashion sense, as many of the previous writings on Millicent Rogers have done. It’s refreshing, and well-deserved. Besides her impeccable collection of fashion and relationships with several important designers, Rogers had many accomplishments worth discovering as well. She was extremely creative and spent her life looking for ways to express herself. She was also very generous, with both her time and resources. She was a mother, a daughter, a wife, and an independent woman in a time when many women strictly followed the rules.
At times, Burns’ writing can seem disjointed, as if snippets from The New York Times and The Washington Post society columns were cut and pasted. But, no author has done such an in-depth job when it comes to sorting out the (sometimes hard to believe) details of Rogers life. Because so many of the well-known stories about Rogers seem to have been passed down over time without a known source, they seem more like legend than fact. By using first-hand accounts from family and friends, including time spent perusing unpublished family photographs, the author is able to shed some light on Rogers’ life and develop her character for the reader. There is little written about Rogers’s personal life, particularly about her personality. Time consuming as I’m sure it was, Burns has done an impeccable job bringing her to life.
Mary Millicent Rogers was born into a prosperous family. Her father, Henry (Harry) Huttleston Rogers, Jr., was the only son of Henry Huttleston Rogers, who along with William and John D. Rockefeller, presided over Standard Oil. Her mother was Mary Benjamin, also from a prominent family. Burns dives right in exploring Millicent’s debutante years and her several marriages and divorces over a short period of time. This well-researched section of the book is filled with quotes from various newspapers and family recollections. This time in Rogers’ life developed her sense of independence, but also reinforced her tie to her family’s money.
A brunette most of her life, Millicent sported a flapper’s short haircut when she stepped out as a soon-to-be young divorcée in 1926. She married again the following year. (The Peralta-Ramos Family archives via St. Martin's Press)
Burns slogs through Rogers’ marriages to Austrian Count Ludwig Salm von Hoogstraeten, Argentinean ArturoPeralta-Ramos and American Ronald Bush Balcom. Rogers had three children: Peter with Salm and Arturo and Paul with Peralta-Ramos. Her last marriage to Balcom ended in 1941. Although she never married again, Rogers had several relationships with public figures such as Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl and Clark Gable. Burns delves into these relationships as well, providing clarity where no other work on Rogers does.She paints a picture of an independent woman who was never fully satisfied with one man, one location, one of anything. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her husbands (or her lovers), but that she was always on the move to what was next, what would open her world just a bit more, whether that was a new relationship or a new house. Burns writes about Rogers as a real person, with heartaches and failed relationships, family dysfunctions and complicated mother-son relationships, and at the end of the day, a woman on a life-long quest for happiness.Burns does an excellent job unearthing Rogers’ generosity. Whether it’s her involvement with recuperating soldiers at her house in Virginia during World War II or her efforts to support the work of the Indians of Taos, she could be selfless when it came to her time and money. She was always willing to help, and seemed to feel that it was important to offer her resources for good.
A display of jewelry at the Millicent Rogers Museum
It is enjoyable to read about Rogers’ time in Taos, particularly since Burns lives in Taos herself. The reader can truly see the author’s love for her home. It lends an air of truth to her description of how Rogers must have felt upon her arrival at the Western outpost. Rogers’ time in Taos, although short, seems to be where she felt most at peace. The rheumatic fever she caught as a child and that plagued her throughout her life was beginning to catch up with her. Her untimely death at age 50 brought her adventurous life to an end. She never once let her fragile health get in the way of exploring new vistas. She was buried in Taos, wrapped in an Indian blanket and wearing some of her favorite Indian jewelry that she had been so avidly collecting. A fitting resting place for an extraordinary woman.
Burns includes a bibliography, never before seen photographs and extensive endnotes, all helpful for those interested in Rogers’ life. She gives Millicent Rogers the kind of attention she deserves, and now her life can be remembered not only for how stylish it was, but also for its generosity, vivacity and kindness.
Further Reading on Millicent Rogers:
In My Fashion by Bettina Ballard, New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1960.
The Glass of Fashion by Cecil Beaton, London: Artillery House, 1989.
Fine Indian Jewelry of the Southwest: The Millicent Rogers Museum Collection by Shelby J. Tisdale, Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006.
The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins, New York: Crown Publishers, 1994.
Over the summer, the exhibition, Beauty CULTure came out at the Annenburg Space for Photography looks at how the Los Angeles culture of beauty, media saturation influences the desire of women and young girls to look a certain way. Now, there are two new books that address several issues that came up in the exhibition. From UC Press’s, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model (September 2011) you have the inside story from model turned sociologist Ashley Mears, while Princeton Press gives us Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful by Daniel S. Hamermesh (August 2011). With New York’s Fashion Week and the accompanying perennial discussions of models and beauty now in full swing, these books seem particularly well-timed.
Ashley Mears is now a sociologist at Boston University, but she began her working life as a fashion model -working in both New York and London and she’s put her reflections and research on the industry into Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model.
Author Ashley Mears
Earlier this week, a Boston Globe article reviewed the book, noting in part: “Mears has produced a fascinating study. . . . She knits together her revealing interviews and draws on the work of sociologist C. Wright Mills, feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon, and other social critics. Yet the greatest strength of “Pricing Beauty’’ is Mears’s own story, one that she artfully threads throughout the book.”
Last week, on Slate.com, writer Libby Copeland took a longer look at the book and the trend of academics writing on the beauty ‘industry’. Copeland notes, Pricing Beauty “offers a mostly grim picture of what’s endured by those trying to make a living off their looks. Models are utterly dispensable, in Mears’ telling: They labor at the mercy of inscrutable bosses, lousy pay, and punishing physical requirements. And for most of them, that’s how the job will remain until they retire at the ripe old age of, say, 26.”
A third article, in the Boston University Arts & Sciences website titled “Defining Beauty” looks specifically at Mears discussion of race in the fashion industry – and interestingly, how it can determine editorial vs. catalog modeling opportunities.
Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful by Daniel S. Hamermesh does not look at modeling specifically, but rather examines how physical appearance affects earning power across a broad spectrum of occupations. And it seems to be getting equal attention from the media at large – though not always positively. Hamermesh is the Sue Killam Professor in the Foundations of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and professor of labor economics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. More importantly, he’s a labor economist who is well-known for his research on “pulchronomics” – which Entertainment Weekly is now calling a ‘buzzword”. Pulchronomics means, essential, the economics of beauty.
Author Daniel S. Hamermesh
Hamermesh’s work, comes from a very different place than that of Mears (he studies the numbers, she studies people) and a recent Forbes Magazine article by Susan Adams called “Does Beauty Really Pay?” seems to find fault with his methods – saying in part “Hamermesh’s reasoning puzzled me, and I scratched my head at how he could pull precise percentages out of old data and what seemed like rough calculations.” She calls his work rambling, quirky and confounding. But also acquiesces that she found the book thought-provoking and illuminating. I’m rather curious to know how his fellow economists are receiving his work – and if anyone is checking up on his numbers. For those who might want to read an excerpt, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a short one in August.
Some of Hamermesh’s other papers on beauty and economics include:
“Changing Looks and Changing Discrimination: The Beauty of Economists,” Economics Letters, December 2006
“Beauty in the Classroom: Instructors’ Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity,” Economics of Education Review, August 2005 (with A. Parker).
“Dress for Success: Does Primping Pay?” Labour Economics, October 2002 (with M. Xin and J. Zhang).
“Business Success and Businesses’ Beauty Capital,” Economics Letters, April 2000, (with G. Pfann, J. Biddle and C. Bosman).
“Beauty, Productivity and Discrimination: Lawyers’ Looks and Lucre,” Journal of Labor Economics, January 1998 (with J. Biddle).
I’ll be very curious to see how scholarly fashion studies publications – such as Fashion Theory – respond to this new work.
Mrs. Ryie Yoshizawa, teacher, fashion designing class, Manzanar Relocation Center, California / photograph by Ansel Adams. 1943. Library of Congress.
“Mrs. Ryie Yoshizawa and class of women students at table with fabric and dressmaking equipment. Students are: Satoko Oka, Chizuko Karnii, Takako Nakanishi, Kikiyo Yamasuchi, Masako Kimochita, Mitsugo Fugi, Mie Mio, Chiye Kawase, and Miyeko Hoshozike.”
Berliner Chic offers a wealth of theoretical references, a historical framework, and a rich bibliography, as well as plenty of charming anecdotes, engaging stories, and ample photographs. One can imagine the reader packing this book before a trip to Berlin and using it as an alternative travel guide.”
—Mila Ganeva, University of Chicago and author of Women in Weimar Fashion.
By happy accident I have just received a spare copy of this enticing new book and I’d like to share that wealth with you! To enter to win a copy of Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion by Susan Ingram and Katrina Sark, simply:
