The Brown Trilby

A propos of my interest in fashion qua design (contra fashion qua art), and being cognizant of the undisputable fact that the triumphal period of modern domestic design occurred between 1932 and 1965, I checked me out from the liberry the germane books from Facts on File's Fashions of a Decade series (edited by Valery Cumming and Elane Feldman).

I've thoroughly perused (though not yet finished reading) the 1930s volume (by Maria Costantino), and have found as much in it of cultural history as of fashion. Herewith are some tidbits that impressed me most strongly, in the order in which they come to mind.

• Holy Friggin' Crap! From the periodical Woman's Journal, some descriptions of Lucien Lelong's designs:

For the morning a dress of Bordeaux red Madiana. The fall of the collar on this neat dress, the bow, and the looped basque effect are all new and interesting. The shoulders are cut to look broad, and the waist is well defined. For the afternoon there is the coat and dress of crêpe marocain in beige and nigger brown.

Whoa! No way! That's just some one-off jerk of a copywriter, right?

"Carol." Velvet Frock, cut on simple lines. Note the new white jabot. Frock in nigger, navy....

"Nan." In soft wool. A Frock for the young. Sapphire, blue, nigger....

(For reasons that I don't remember what they are, it is my impression that this was a British publication. Still, the casual, overt racism is astonishing. It makes me wonder if, in future, the casual pejorative description of religious fundamentalists as "fundies" will be likewise frowned upon. I can't help but defend it, though, by arguing that whereas blacks have no choice in the matter of their blackness, to persist in this day and age in trying to foist one's own religious fundamentalism upon the rest of society seems to require a measure of psycho- and sociopathology.)

These quotations are from illustrations rather than the text of the book itself; Costantino makes no mention of uglinesses employed in the advertising of self-beautification.

• Preadaptation There's an illustration of an old-timey electric fridge, which allowed "the housewife in the ad to cook dinner in her evening dress." It's what's in the fridge that interests me, though. The motor takes up as much space as the freezer on today's fridges, and there's a tiny fridge-compartment freezer; so there's (1) not as much fridge space, and (2) hardly any freezer space. There're no crisper drawers, and no shelves on the door. There are five bottles (one wine, one milk, and one OJ) and two jars; these, plus the half-dozen eggs in a little under-shelf dispenser and what may be a stick of butter, comprise all of the comparatively non-perishable items. Together, they take up perhaps 1/3 of the available volume. As for the rest of the volume, there is: a roast on a plate, two molded salads, a tossed salad, two desserts in cups, something in a casserole and something on a plate, a head of lettuce, and several round fruits or vegetables.

In other words, what the fridge contains is: today's dinner and tomorrow's breakfast and lunch – that is, a single day's worth of food. In its early days, then, the fridge was in essence just a giant crisper, less a cold cabinet for food storage than a food-freshener. Perhaps a sign of the beginnings of today's anti-aging, anti-decay sensibilities?

It reminds me of a 1920s or '30s ad for a diswasher in a German magazine that I saw elsewhere; it was just a metal barrel with a lid and a motor, and I think a powered mangler. It, too, showed the lady of house minding it in evening clothes. Such examples suggest to me that, at the time of their introduction, these things really were just time-savers, because they had not yet changed domestic habits to the extent that they have done now: even middle-class women then still shopped every day at the greengrocer's and the butcher's; and they probably only did a load or two of laundry a week, and no-one had all that many clothes. (It further calls to mind a museum display I saw of an 19th century machine-shop, with precision metal-working machine tools mounted on wooden frames, powered with the aid of woven belts and wheels, all within a wooden shed.) In the 1930s even urban daily life was not all that far removed from the 19th c. frontier town's.

• Other Stuff The clothes themselves are the first widely-available ones that you could almost get away with wearing in ordinary life today. I think the styles of the 1920s were the first that I would call modern, by which I mean they were a significant stylistic departure from the sartorial traditions of preceding centuries, at least for those to whom current style was a matter of social interest, but although that may have obtained for the designs of the 1920s, they are as stylistically unfortunate as designs of the late '60s and '70s.