Geometrics and the Buyer of Hats (Growing Up in the 1920's/1930's)

                Walking into the library, I remember feeling particularly intimidated by what I had to ask for. The friendly woman at the desk told me where the old magazines were and advised me to “watch out for the troll,” suppressing a good-natured chuckle. I went downstairs and was instantly overwhelmed by volumes upon volumes of theses, texts, magazines, and works of literary art.

                Moving amongst the leather-bound guards I finally found the section I was looking for: magazines. More accurately, Vogue. The woman at the desk had told me not to worry and that there wouldn’t be any dancing gay men or cone-bra-sporting Madonnas in there, which made me more than a little disappointed. I may or may not have cried in the bathroom at my hopes being dashed. I also may have practiced Vogueing for several hours before my library visit.

                I selected a tome comprised of Vogues from the early 1920’s and staggered back upstairs, stopping by the desk and telling the woman that I’d found the troll and he told me if I’d answered his riddles three he’d give me an overly heavy book. After sitting down, I opened it. My eyes were assaulted by monochrome – there was so much black-and-white! Was color ink more expensive? Is there a way the printers could have introduced color more quickly? I couldn’t decide. And more importantly I didn’t really want to.

                A little backstory – I’m currently in a Roaring Twenties literature class, where my professor has already mentioned Vogue and Vanity Fair numerous times, saying that they embodied the era more thoroughly than any thesis ever could. The fads and how silly they were to some critics, the disillusionment of American youth, the stagnation of optimism as a result of the war and the murmurings of rebellion against Victorian values and sexual mores. It was a wildly changing time, and most that were a part of it were lucky to be so – materialism was rampant, and markets were booming.

                Opening that Vogue – no matter how non-choreographed it might have been – I was transported back into the time that I was studying, learning about the everyday of what had been described to me in books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound. It was fascinating; learning what kids my age were growing up with, noting the slang peppered through advertisements (“Are you keen on cars?” read one. “A peep into the boudoir of any much sought-after woman…” began another.) and seeing what was being advertised, like bust absorbent lotion (some men just want to watch the world burn) and eye-sparkling cream.

                It’s therefore really easy to see why Amory Blaine took such issue with the materialism of the age – it was everywhere, impossible to escape. Which is why the article I found on “Buying a Hat with the Parisienne” was so interesting to me. It speaks of Paris in the sense of fashion, whereas I had already learned about it in a literary sense. It boggles my mind that Americans could go to Paris to escape the mundaneness of their everyday lives and gain a fresh start only to pick up an American vogue and learn of a miniature invasion into their new, romantic, somehow less mundane everyday.

                The detail in the article was extraordinary, but then again that’s to my Google-addled brain, where the answers are just a click away no matter where I am. I’m sure to a kid – hopefully a girl – my age in this time period the article would have been fascinating; invaluable, even. At some points the article reads more like a novel (“If the client, like Madame Errazuriz, is a woman of remarkable taste who has herself the most amusing of conceptions, then, the creation is made by the two, but not without discussion, for the designers are inflexible in regard to this tradition, and, in that, they are quite right.”).

                Coming away from my experience, I was humbled by the idea of the old once being young, and the young that would become old – how droll will our paper-issues of Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Esquire, Rolling Stone seem in comparison to the newer magazines of the future!

                To grow, to mature, to become more – certainly the children of the 1920’s did that, growing up to fight in World War II shortly after living through World War I. My generation has already lived through several catastrophes, though now reporting has become much more focused on the 24-hour news channel, and as such more is being reported. At last I realized the mindset of these characters I’ve been studying. Maybe I have more in common with them than I originally thought.