Vanity Fair Magazine

Articles from Vanity Fair Magazine

VANITY FAIR Throws a Bobbed Hair Party (Vanity Fair, 1919)

A smattering of cartoons depicting those sweet young things of yore who were partial to bathtub gin, short skirts and
short hair styles.


In 1919 you didn’t have to be plugged-in 24/7 to the youth scene in order to recognize that bobbed hair was where the fickle finger of fashion was pointing. Perhaps the editors of VANITY FAIR presumed that a bobbed hair party was the best social alternative that could have been offered six months after the 1919 passage of the 18th Amendment, which ushered in the Prohibition of alcohol throughout the United States.

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Mocking Ad Practices in the Early 20th Century (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1914)

In the attached Vanity Fair article, James Montgomery Flagg (1877 – 1960) had a good laugh at the hand that fed him: the New York advertising establishment.

Better remembered in our own time as the creator of the iconic I Want You for the U.S. Army poster (1917), Flagg was a prolific artist and one of the highest paid magazine and advertising illustrators of his day. As the era of mass-media advertising developed, Flagg didn’t just have a good seat on the fifty-yard line; he was a player on the field and he saw his work reproduced in all sorts of unlikely venues.

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‘The Lady and the Plane” (Vanity Fair, 1919)

In the June, 1920 issue of British Vogue, an anonymous correspondent tried her hand at prophecy:

As surely as the woman of yesterday was born to ride in a limousine, the woman of today was born to fly an aeroplane.

-that said, we have higher hopes for the women of the 21st Century – however, a year earlier, the Vanity Fair writer charged with covering all aspects of motoring, both horizontal and vertical, penned this enthusiastic article and filled it with the names of many of the women aviators who were at that time, striving to make new records in aviation history; it must have been a very exciting time in history to experience (except for the dental care).

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Good and Bad Writing About World War I (Vanity Fair, 1915)

A small column from a 1915 issue of Vanity Fair in which the correspondent praised the virtues of Howard Copeland (an American psychologist and ambulance volunteer working in Frabce), Gertrude Aldrich (author of an Atlantic Magazine essay titled, Little House on the Marne), Cardinal Mercier (author of the Great Belgian Pastoral) and W.F. Bailey (authored a paper concerning the war in Northeastern Europe). These writers are preferred to the usually celebrated ink-slingers like Hellaire Belloc, Rudyard Kipling, Anatole France, and Arnold Bennett who are all compared to amateur recruiting sergeants in support of the War.


This image file is poorly scanned: we recommend that you print it for greater legibility.

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Jack Dempsey In Silent Movies (Motion Picture News & Vanity Fair, 1919)

Two articles from two different magazines reported the news that the World Champion Boxer of 1919, Jack Dempseystyle=border:none (1895 – 1983), would soon try his hand at movie acting. The Vanity Fair item is actually a cartoon by that old sentimentalist, John Held, Jrstyle=border:none.(1889-1958).


In the future, other athletes would follow in his steps to Hollywood; his fellow boxer Gene Tunney would follow him out there eight years later (The Fighting Marines). Swimmers Buster Crabbe (Buck Rogers) and Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan) got the fever and came out during the early days of sound movies.

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Willa Cather Gets a Bad Review (Vanity Fair, 1913)

Writing his review of O Pioneers, DRESS and VANITY FAIR book critic Henry Brinsley wrote:

Miss Willa Cather in O Pioneers! (O title!!) is neither a skilled storyteller nor the least bit of an artist. And yet by the end of the book, something has happened in the readers mind that leaves him grateful…There isn’t a vestige of ‘style’ as such: for page after page one is dazed at the ineptness of the medium and the triviality of the incidents…And the secret of this is the persistence throughout of a single fine quality of the author – her extraordinary sincerity.

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Modern Women for a Modern Age (Vanity Fair, 1921)

Contained within the confines of the attached PDF is an excerpt from the review of the New York production of the 1921 play, A Bill of Divorcement by Clemence Dane (born Winifred Ashton 1888-1965) – with much enthusiasm, the reviewer wrote:

We know of no better expression of the creed of the new generation than that which Clemence Dane has drawn up….

What followed was a very short soliloquy which beautifully summed up not only the philosophy of the modern woman, but the philosophy of much the Twentieth Century.

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Social Jottings from Newport (Vanity Fair, 1922)

Here is a mock society page that sought to belittle all the goings on among the sweet young things at Newportstyle=border:none during the season of 1922. The article was illustrated by Clara Tice (Art Director of The Masses).

A large and fashionably dressed group of Newport’s ‘creme de la creme’ were observed on burning sands. Mixed bathing was indulged in…Many succulent bits of gossip and spicey rumor have been overheard in the ladies annex during the noon dressing hour and right merry time was had by all.

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