Vanity Fair Magazine – Old Magazine Articles

Young Picasso
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

“Upon his first arrival in Paris, Picasso met with success. It was ’99… At that time he had a face of ivory, and was as beautiful as a Greek boy; irony, thought and effort have brought slight lines to the waxen countenance of this little Napoleonic man… At that time, Picasso was living the life of the provincial in Paris… He had won fame there by his portraits of actresses in the public eye. Jeanne Bloch, Otero – all the stars of the Exposition. Those paintings are priceless today; the intelligent museums have bought them.”

Fashion Notes from London
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Written in a prose style reminiscent of an owner’s manual, these pages spell out the 1923 tailoring rules for men’s formalwear:

“Essentially traditionalist in matter of men’s clothes, London is never more
conservative than in dress clothes, and the changes from year to year are of the slightest… However, one still sees far more dinner jackets (ie. “tuxedos“) in restaurants than of yore, when black tie and short coat were for the home circle and the club alone, but in society, whether for small dance, ball, dinner or theatre party, the white tie is the rule.”

April is the Cruelest Month
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

“With the double-breasted coat, the single-breasted waistcoat is the rule and to repeat the crossing of lines twice in one suit is an entirely unreasonable exaggeration.”

1923 Germany
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Maximilian Harden (1861 – 1927) was a major-league journalist and editor in Germany at the time of the First World War. Between 1914-18 he was all-in for a German victory. After the defeat he believed in the democracy that came with the Weimar Republic – but he hated the economic state that his country was forced to endure – and that is what he addresses in this column.

“An old married couple, or a widow, who in 1914 were assured of an untroubled existence on an income 6,000 marks a year, cannot buy with that amount today a pair of shoes, or any new sheets, and can get nine or ten pounds of butter at the most…If anyone has looked upon all this destitution, which is borne by many in silence and true dignity, if anyone has seen this decay of a whole nation, which is like the crumbling of some venerable cathedral, and if in spite of this he puts it all down as camouflage, then that person has a heart of stone in his breast.”

Expressionism as Theory
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Ernest Boyd (1887 – 1946), all-around swell guy and significant literary figure in 1920s New York, took a hard look at German Expressionism and its wide influence on other Teutonic arts in the early Twenties. He paid particular attention to the German critic Hermann Bahr (1863 – 1934), who coined the term, Expressionism, and had much to say about the movement.

Rudyard Kipling
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Literary critic Philip Guedallia (1889 – 1944) reluctantly concluded that the contributions of Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) to the world of letters were genuine – and, no matter what you think of him, his writing will be around for a good while.

“He sharpened the English language to a knife-edge, and with it he has cut brilliant patterns on the surface of our prose literature.”

Tristan Tzara on the New Expressionists
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Artist Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963) reported from Berlin for the editors at Vanity Fair on what’s new in German art. With tremendous enthusiasm he explained everything that was going on throughout all the German studios – he did not hold back – every name brand is included: Schwitters, Klee, Kandinsky, Lehmbruck, Gropius and the Bauhaus.

Marcel Proust
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

In this column, art critic Clive Bell (1881 – 1964) explained why neither Britain or America would have been capable of producing a writer like Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922).

Skirt Length: High or Low?
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

“The important question of the proper length of dress skirts is again racking the public press and putting a large part of our female population completely off their feed.”

‘The Hope of American English”

Vanity Fair correspondent L.L. Jones cracked open a copy of The American Language by H.L. Mencken:

At last a man has arrived who knows something about English prose style under American conditions…

The rest of his thoughts can be read in the attached review.

The Well Dressed Man Confronts Bad Taste
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1918)

On page one of this three page guide, you will find some essential notes and illustrations from the editors of Vanity Fair regarding the good taste of 1918 (as well as the simply awful).

The Wartime Leadership of Woodrow Wilson
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1918)

There are various reasons for Woodrow Wilson’s present preëminence. For one thing he represented, for years, the rights, under International Law, of the nations which were not in the war, and whatever his private opinions may have been as to an attitude of strict legality….Then, further, he is at the head of a nation which had no selfish motives in coming in. America wants for herself no new territory, no new spheres of influence. France wants Alsace and Lorraine. Italy wants ‘Italia Irridenta’. England, though she declared war to save France from being overrun through losing the channel ports, has gained incidentally all German Africa and the German islands of the South Seas…

Click here to read a 1913 article about Woodrow Wilson’s Under Secretary of the Navy: Franklin Delano Roosevelt…

Golf Goes Yankee
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

The attached golf article first appeared in a 1922 Vanity Fair titled The Royal and Ancient Game. Penned by golf legend Charles Chick Evans, Jr. (1890 – 1979) it traces the birth of the game and its migration across the sea where the game was heartily welcomed:

Golf seemed a gift from an high. Across the water it came and our best people took it up. They had discovered it in their travels abroad. It is true that poor people played it in Britain, but it seemed very sure that they would not do so in America…

Click here to read about the American cars of 1922.

The Invention of the Car was Revolutionary
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1920)

As early as 1920, the number of automobiles was quickly growing throughout the Western world. In this very brief article, a journalist lays out how rapidly life was changing in the United States as a result of the horseless carriage.

The village smithy is no more. In the place of that interesting relic of a bygone day, there stands a substantial concrete building marked ‘Garage’…

The Well Dressed Man in February
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1919)

Attached herein, you will find the fashionable coats, suits, shoes and cufflinks for men from the harsh winter of 1919 that had been approved by the Fifth Avenue swells of the VANITY FAIR editorial department.

The World War One Trench Coat
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1918)

The fashion designers of the past ninety-four years all seem to be of one mind when it comes to the subject of the trench coat: it needs to be re-designed every four months. Years have passed, but still the garment has not reached a final state; meanwhile the rest of us only get one shot at a first impression. It is no matter whether the one who wears the trench coat is an actual trench-dweller or simply one who Tweets all day; the designers all have their opinions regarding the fluctuating number of straps and ‘D’ rings. There has been no end to the amount of cleverness applied to the re-treading of the garment and through the years we have been treated to doggy trench coats and lady’s evening gowns cut to resemble trench coats. Yet in the dark days of 1917, when the United States entered the fray, it was not lost on those who glanced at the attached column that too many of these raincoats were already buried in the damp grave yards of France and Belgium.

Click here to read about the fashion legacy of W.W. II: the t-shirt…

A Frenchman Looks at New York
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1919)

A travel article written by the former French fighter pilot Jean Murat (1888 – 1968)-who, one year hence, would commence a fruitful career in film acting that would lead to performances in over ninety movies. Mr. Murat was not terribly impressed with New York at all. Murat found the New Yorker’s love for all things French a tad tiresome.

Click here to read about the NYC air-raid wardens of W. W. II…

‘The Marvelous Boy of the Movies”
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

Shortly before his movie The Kid was released, Charlie Chaplin (1889 – 1977) wrote a few remarks on the discovery of Jack Coogan, and the picture built around him in the attached Vanity Fair article, The Marvelous Boy of the Movies.