Articles from Vanity Fair Magazine
Here are five quick sketches by the French artist Rabajoi depicting the women of France fulfilling their various obligations as Mariannes, as sweethearts and as family members.
W.W. I and French Women (Vanity Fair, 1916) Read More »
A short piece on the British novelist Hugh Walpole (1884 – 1941). This notice concerns the writer’s first trip to the United States following the the close of the First World War and the printing of his novel, The Secret City; which reflects much of what the writer saw in the Russian Revolution during his service with the British Government:
In ‘The Secret City’, as in ‘ The Dark Forrest,’ the author handles very special material at first hand. Mr. Walpole served in the Russian Army during the first year of the war…He was in Russia all through the Revolution. ‘The Secret City’ is real Russia (even Russians admit this), somber, tragic, idealistic, half-maddened by the virus of revolt, yet imposing upon one a quality at once presaging and splendid.
Hugh Walpole Returns to America (Vanity Fair, 1919) Read More »
The 1914 social register for London did not go to press until 1915, so great was the task of assessing the butcher’s bill paid by that tribe. The letters written from camp and the front by those privileged young men all seemed to give thanks that their youth had been matched with this hour and that they might be able to show to one and all that they were worthy.
…For not even in the Great Rebellion against Charles I did the nobility lose so many of its members as the list of casualties of the present war displays. In the first sixteen months of operations no less than eight hundred men of title were killed in action, or died of their wounds, and over a thousand more were serving with the land or sea forces.
A similar article can be read here…
Click here to read about the W.W. I efforts of Prince Edward, the future Duke of Windsor.
Click here to read another article about the old European order.
The British Aristocracy and the Great War (Vanity Fair, 1916) Read More »
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.
‘The Marvelous Boy of the Movies” (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922) Read More »
A leaf torn from the chic pages of VANITY FAIR in which eight snap shots depict various high-profile New Yorkers absorbed in their officer training routine. The journalist opined:
The Business Man’s Camp at Plattsburg has accomplished several of it’s avowed objects. It has proved itself practicable. It has demonstrated that men of high standing in business, professional and social affairs are willing to make personal sacrifices for the country’s good. It has shown that American officers have made good use of lessons taught by the War, and have adapted their tactics to conform to modern exigencies. Finally, the Plattsburg camp has grounded a large number of intelligent Americans in the rudiments of warfare.
You can read an article about General Wood here.
Attached is a Vanity Fair article printed a few months after the Lusitania sinking in which the journalist listed the many and myriad explanations as to why this event was such a departure from the traditions of naval warfare set in place by John Paul Jones, Admirals Nelson and Dewey.
Click here to read read a 1919 German condemnation of Admiral Von Tirpitz.
The Lusitania Attack and the Violation of Naval Traditions (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1915) Read More »
Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), said to be the birth mother of Modern Dance, is profiled in the attached VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE article written by Arthur Hazlitt Perry:
She is truly a remarkable woman. She never dances, acts, dresses, or thinks like anybody else. She is essentially the child of another age, a Twentieth Century exponent of a by-gone civilization. She missed her cue to come on, by twenty-three hundred years.
A Profile of Isadora Duncan (Vanity Fair, 1915) Read More »
Although the steel tennis racket would not know true glory until Jimmy Connors used his Wilson T2000 in the 1970s, a big splash was made by William A. Larned (1872 – 1926; seven times champion of the U.S. Open) when he designed the Dayton Steel Racket in 1922. It wasn’t the first steel racket, but it was an improvement on the existing ones.
The Steel Tennis Racket Makes It’s Appearance (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922) Read More »
This article was written by the silent film star herself for a fashionable American magazine concerning a few of the difficulties in the way of dress, make-up, manners and technique an actress might consider before portraying a child on stage or screen.
Mary Pickford Considers Her Rolls (Vanity Fair, 1920) Read More »
At the very peak of bourgeois respectability, one of the high priests of art and culture, Gilbert Seldes (1893 – 1970), sat comfortably on his woolsack atop Mount Parnasus and piled the praises high and deep for one of the lowest of the commercial arts. The beneficiary was the cartoonist George Herriman (1880 – 1944), creator of Ignatz Mouse and all other absurd creations that appeared in his syndicated comic strip, Krazy Kat (1913-1944):
His strange unnerving distorted trees, his totally unlivable houses, his magic carpets, his faery foam, are items in a composition which is incredibly with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.
Krazy Kat: Low Art Meets High Art (Vanity Fair, 1922) Read More »
