1938

Articles from 1938

Edith Head on Paris Frocks (Photoplay Magazine, 1938)

A telegraph from Hollywood costume designer Edith Head (1897 – 1981) to the editorial offices of PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE listing various highlights of the 1938 Paris fashion scene. Not surprisingly, it reads like a telegram:

Paris says:


• Long waistlines, short flared skirts, fitted bodices, tweeds combines with velvet, warm colors…

• Hair up in pompadours piles of curls and fringe bangs.

• Braid and embroidery galore lace and ribbon trimmings loads of jewelry mostly massive.

• Skirts here short and not too many pleats more slim skirts with slight flare.

The great Hollywood modiste wrote in this odd, Tarzan-english for half a page, but by the end one is able to envision the feminine Paris of the late Thirties.

Recommended Reading: Edith Head: The Fifty-Year Career of Hollywood’s Greatest Costume Designerstyle=border:none.

Click here to read about physical perfection during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Clare Boothe: The Woman Behind ”The Women” (Stage Magazine, 1938)

The following STAGE MAGAZINE article by American playwright Clare Boothe (Clare Boothe Luce 1903 – 1987) appeared in print shortly after the successful opening of her play, The Women:

Of course, writing plays wasn’t exactly a flash of genius. I mean I am shewed in spots…But inspiration or calculation, it was frightfully lucky that I hit on writing plays, wasn’t it? And it was so wonderfully fortunate that quite a lot of people that I’d met socially on Park Avenue, at very exclusive parties, people like cowboys, cooks, manicurists, nurses, hat-check girls, fitters, exchorines, declasses countesses, Westport intellectuals, Hollywood producers Southern girls and radical columnists, gave me such lovely material to write about.

Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York nightclubs of 1937.

The N.K.V.D. and the Purges Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

Congratulations were in order in Soviet Russia last week. The occasion was the 20th anniversary of the famed N.K.V.D., secret police, and celebration of that organization’s success in ‘rooting out the enemies of the people’

Beauty in the Congo (Click Magazine, 1938)

Fashions these days are simply fraught with Third World influences such as tattoos and piercings and there is no reason to suspect that fashion’s dictators might one day soon decide that the elegant life is best lived with a cone-shaped head. The attached fashion article is illustrated with three pictures of the mode-conscious Manbetu tribe of Northeaster Africa who live life large as the African Longheads.

Mussolini and the Italian Expatriots (Ken Magazine, 1938)

In September, 1936, when the League of Nations refused to expel the African empire from its membership, Il Duce kept Italian representatives away from League halls. They have never set foot in them since. Last spring British envoys led a successful boycott against diplomatic attendance at a first anniversary celebration of Italy’s conquest. Ill Duce countered with a peeve so wrathful that Italian newspapers made no mention of Great Britain for two whole days.

Meet Joseph Goebbels (Pathfinder Magazine, 1938

Goebbels is the creator of the Hitler legend. He is the white-washer of the Nazi reputation. In the 1920s the party had an unsavory name because its ranks included a clique of of homosexuals. As early as 1922 a Nazi meeting at Munich voted that no woman should ever hold political office. Goebbels twisted the party’s abnormal dislike of women into something ‘respectable’ – the doctrine that a woman’s place was in the kitchen and the maternity ward.

The 1938 Spies (Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

Suddenly last June, a Federal grand jury in New York City hoisted the curtain on ‘America’s most significant spy prosecution since the [First] World War’ by indicting 18 persons for participating in a conspiracy to steal U.S. defense secrets for Germany. Subsequently, only four of the 18 could be found for trial. The others, including two high officials of the German War Ministry, were safe in – or had escaped to – the Fatherland.

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