Gertrude Hubbell, Ruth Peters and Mildred Grimwood, hiking their skirts at the shoreline of the beach in Averne, Queens, New York, NY
photo by Wallace G. Levison, September 8, 1897
Les femmes de l’avenir (part 3/4).
Part of a series of photographic postcards from 1902 portraying women in different professions they might follow in the future. They’re completely brilliant.
High heels — as a fashion statement, status symbol, and sexual weapon — have been around for a while. But it was a French designer named Roger Vivier who popularized the heel’s purest form: stilettos.
Vivier started with the vamp of the shoe (the part that covers the toes), bringing it down to show a bit more foot, making more explicit the high heel’s relation to the corset. (The term “cleavage,” tellingly, is used to describe the results of the forces both exert.) Vivier then narrowed the heel as much as possible, wrapping plastic or leather around a steel rod as thin and sharp as the Italian needle-pointed dagger known as the stiletto.
Below a New Look dress, a Vivier stiletto was an exclamation, the end of the elegant sentence of a woman’s figure. The 1950s woman was big and small in all the appropriate places. The stiletto made her feet seem tiny by a trick of angles, and her legs long by the elevation of the heel. In stilettos, her posture shifted — chest and backside out, back slightly arched — and her walk swayed.
life:
On this day in LIFE Magazine… The Teen-Age Telephone Tie Up
“Frank E. Webner, pony express rider,” ca. 1861
The first ride of the Pony Express began on April 3, 1860. The service would end in October 1861, with the advent of the transcontinental telegraph.
1920 Hart Shaffner Marx catalogue
Debating Bloomers
Bicycling provided women with new leisure opportunities and helped begin a fashion revolution. Despite the sport’s popularity with young women, society still discouraged their participation with information that claimed long-term health risks. In Appleton, Wisconsin, the first sight of a woman wearing a bloomer suit on city streets created tremendous controversy, because the clothing questioned socially constructed gender roles. Even state leaders like Belle Case La Follette discouraged bloomers and argued in favor of more conservative and traditional clothing.
Most women bicyclists, however, still wore long dresses, such as Augusta Wilhelmy, who is shown riding a pneumatic bicycle at her family’s farm near Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Women’s bicycle models protected skirts with covered gear shafts and rear wheel netting that blocked clothing from getting caught in the chain and spokes.
via: Manitowoc Public Library by way of University of Wisconsin Digital Collections
Alexandra of Denmark (Alexandra Caroline Marie Charlotte Louise Julia; 1 December 1844 – 20 November 1925) was the wife of Edward VII of the United Kingdom. As such, she was Queen consort of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Empress of India, from 1901 to 1910.
Studio Fishing
A unique real photo postcard
from AtypicalArt
