Vanity Fair Magazine

Articles from Vanity Fair Magazine

Young Picasso
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

“Upon his first arrival in Paris, Picasso met with success. It was ’99… At that time he had a face of ivory, and was as beautiful as a Greek boy; irony, thought and effort have brought slight lines to the waxen countenance of this little Napoleonic man… At that time, Picasso was living the life of the provincial in Paris… He had won fame there by his portraits of actresses in the public eye. Jeanne Bloch, Otero – all the stars of the Exposition. Those paintings are priceless today; the intelligent museums have bought them.”

Fashion Notes from London
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Written in a prose style reminiscent of an owner’s manual, these pages spell out the 1923 tailoring rules for men’s formalwear:


“Essentially traditionalist in matter of men’s clothes, London is never more
conservative than in dress clothes, and the changes from year to year are of the slightest… However, one still sees far more dinner jackets (ie. “tuxedos“) in restaurants than of yore, when black tie and short coat were for the home circle and the club alone, but in society, whether for small dance, ball, dinner or theatre party, the white tie is the rule.”

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1923 Germany
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Maximilian Harden (1861 – 1927) was a major-league journalist and editor in Germany at the time of the First World War. Between 1914-18 he was all-in for a German victory. After the defeat he believed in the democracy that came with the Weimar Republic – but he hated the economic state that his country was forced to endure – and that is what he addresses in this column.


“An old married couple, or a widow, who in 1914 were assured of an untroubled existence on an income 6,000 marks a year, cannot buy with that amount today a pair of shoes, or any new sheets, and can get nine or ten pounds of butter at the most…If anyone has looked upon all this destitution, which is borne by many in silence and true dignity, if anyone has seen this decay of a whole nation, which is like the crumbling of some venerable cathedral, and if in spite of this he puts it all down as camouflage, then that person has a heart of stone in his breast.”

Expressionism as Theory
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Ernest Boyd (1887 – 1946), all-around swell guy and significant literary figure in 1920s New York, took a hard look at German Expressionism and its wide influence on other Teutonic arts in the early Twenties. He paid particular attention to the German critic Hermann Bahr (1863 – 1934), who coined the term, Expressionism, and had much to say about the movement.

Rudyard Kipling
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Literary critic Philip Guedallia (1889 – 1944) reluctantly concluded that the contributions of Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) to the world of letters were genuine – and, no matter what you think of him, his writing will be around for a good while.


“He sharpened the English language to a knife-edge, and with it he has cut brilliant patterns on the surface of our prose literature.”

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Tristan Tzara on the New Expressionists
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Artist Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963) reported from Berlin for the editors at Vanity Fair on what’s new in German art. With tremendous enthusiasm he explained everything that was going on throughout all the German studios – he did not hold back – every name brand is included: Schwitters, Klee, Kandinsky, Lehmbruck, Gropius and the Bauhaus.

Marcel Proust
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

In this column, art critic Clive Bell (1881 – 1964) explained why neither Britain or America would have been capable of producing a writer like Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922).

Marcel Proust
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

In this column, art critic Clive Bell (1881 – 1964) explained why neither Britain or America would have been capable of producing a writer like Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922).

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‘The Hope of American English”

Vanity Fair correspondent L.L. Jones cracked open a copy of The American Language by H.L. Mencken:

At last a man has arrived who knows something about English prose style under American conditions…


The rest of his thoughts can be read in the attached review.

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The Wartime Leadership of Woodrow Wilson
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1918)

There are various reasons for Woodrow Wilson’s present preëminence. For one thing he represented, for years, the rights, under International Law, of the nations which were not in the war, and whatever his private opinions may have been as to an attitude of strict legality….Then, further, he is at the head of a nation which had no selfish motives in coming in. America wants for herself no new territory, no new spheres of influence. France wants Alsace and Lorraine. Italy wants ‘Italia Irridenta’. England, though she declared war to save France from being overrun through losing the channel ports, has gained incidentally all German Africa and the German islands of the South Seas…


Click here to read a 1913 article about Woodrow Wilson’s Under Secretary of the Navy: Franklin Delano Roosevelt…

Siegfried Sassoon on the Soldier Poets
(Vanity Fair, 1920)

The following five page article was written by the World War I poet, Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), in an

attempt to give a rough outline of what the British poets did in the Great War, making every allowance for the fact that they were writing under great difficulty….


Sassoon gave a thorough going-over of every war poet that he admired, naming at least twenty. It is a wonderful and revealing read for all those who have come to admire the poets of the First World War and Sigfried Sassoon in particular.


Click here to read additional articles about W.W. I poetry.

Golf Goes Yankee
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

The attached golf article first appeared in a 1922 Vanity Fair titled The Royal and Ancient Game. Penned by golf legend Charles Chick Evans, Jr. (1890 – 1979) it traces the birth of the game and its migration across the sea where the game was heartily welcomed:

Golf seemed a gift from an high. Across the water it came and our best people took it up. They had discovered it in their travels abroad. It is true that poor people played it in Britain, but it seemed very sure that they would not do so in America…


Click here to read about the American cars of 1922.

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Winston Churchill Steps Down as First Lord of the Admiralty
(Vanity Fair, 1916)

After the British withdrawal from Gallipoli it was time for the architect of the disaster, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to resign his office. Wishing to still play a part in the Great War, Churchill assumed the rank of Major with his old regiment, the Oxfordshire Hussars:

To have been ruler of the King’s Navy, and then to take a subordinate place in a trench in Flanders, involved a considerable change even for one whose life had been full of startling and dramatic moments.


Click here to read a review of Churchill’s remembrance of World War I .

‘When Women Rule”(Vanity Fair, 1918)

Some well-chosen words by L.L. Jones, one of the many forgotten Suffragettes of yore, who looked longingly to new day:


So far as political equality is concerned I believe I could adjust myself quite readily to a society governed by United States presidentesses, State governesses, and city mayorines, alderwomen, chairwomen, directrices, senatresses, and congresswomen, and I believe I should be just as happy if clergywomen preached to me, doctrices prescribed for me, and policewomen helped me across the street, and chuffeuresses ran the taxis which on rare occasions I can afford to take.


Read a 1918 article about the women’s city.

Paris Fashion: Spring, 1915
(Vanity Fair, 1915)

During the Spring of 1915 Mme. Parisienne had decided that it was time to add some gaiety into her wardrobe. Since August of the previous summer there had been such bad news and although the rationing of fabric continued, there was still much available for the asking.

Click to read about the U.S. fabric rationing during W.W. II.

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