Vanity Fair Magazine

Articles from Vanity Fair Magazine

Photographs of the Kaiser’s Children (Vanity Fair, 1914)

Photographic portraits of the six sons and one daughter of the German Kaiser. The sons pose polished, varnished and bemedaled as the military fops they were trained to be: Born in a palace; in a barracks bred. The journalist points out that even Wilhelm’s one daughter served as a Colonel in an elite cavalry regiment.


Click here to read about the royal princess colonels of of the pre-war period.


~Click Here to Read About Women in World War One~

Isadora Duncan in Rye (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1915)

Here is a paragraph about the school of dance that was maintained by Isadora Duncan in Rye, New York; the notice is illustrated by three stunning photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864 – 1952) depicting thirteen young girls in Grecian attire.

London Society, 1915 (Vanity Fair, 1915)

Five months into the general unpleasantness going on across the Channel had transformed London into a very different city, and sadly, it was the leisured classes that had to shoulder most of the burden:

London is well worth living in these troubled days if only for its contrasts…The gloom of the streets, the sinister play of the searchlights, the abnormal hour at which the theatres open and and the public houses close, the fact that half the male population is in khaki and the other half would like to be, that Society is wearing Noah’s Ark clothes and that to buy a new hat is a crime, that there are no dances, no dinners, no suppers, no premieres, no shooting, no no posing, no frivolity, nor idling, it’s rather quickening, you know. But the searchlights have absolutely killed all practical romance.

Paul Thevenaz: Rhythmatist Painter (Vanity Fair, 1916)

A one page article regarding Swiss-born painter Paul Thevenazstyle=border:none (1891 – 1921) and his thoughts on the relationship between dance and modern painting. The article is accompanied by four of his portraits; the sitters were Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, the Comtesse E. De Beaumont and Comtesse Mathieu De Noailles.The profile was written by the novelist Marie Louise Van Saanen.

Read a 1937 article about another gay artist: Paul Cadmus.

A Covered Golf Caddy Bag (Vanity Fair, 1915)

A few words, accompanied by a photograph, concerning the ‘traveler’s covered caddy bag‘ — another attempt at thwarting the efforts of ‘the golf thief’ as well as just plain lousy whether.

The Well-Born Officer (Vanity Fair, 1918)

For it’s October issue, the editors of VANITY FAIR magazine stepped up to the plate and did their bit with this splendid review of all the finest uniform apparel that New York City offered it’s silk stocking officers. The article is nicely illustrated with photographs of a double-breasted mackinaw coat, two officer blouses (one of a wool-silk blend), a classic silk knit service tie as well as a very fine trench boot.


New From Amazon: Doughboys on the Great War:
How American Soldiers Viewed Their Military Experience
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Clothing the Camper and Yachtsman (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1917)

For all too few it is understood that fashion need not end in the wilderness: for it is more than likely that that was where the need for fashion was first recognized and it was there, among the toads and the dung, that the Well-Dressed man first crawled out of the muck and civilizationstyle=border:none

was born. With all this in mind, Robert Lloyd Trevor reviewed the fashions for the enjoyment of camp-life in this 1917 Vanity Fair review. Another vital concern touched upon by the journalist was the clothing available to the yachtsmen at that time:

Yachting is one of the things that begin at the bottom. That is to say, at the shoes. They are the foundation, as it were, for the rest of life on the rolling deep.

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