In the Roaring Twenties – in between dispatches on the Paris lines, portraits of society girls like Lady Diana Cooper, and guides to which pedigree dogs were fundamentally chicest (“If you have hateful personal characteristics to hide, avoid owning a poodle, or it will bear your secret to the world – on four legs and a leash”) – Vogue regularly commissioned journalist and cartoonist Anne Harriet Fish to satirise the more ridiculous elements of the society of the day.
In one issue, she illustrated a satirical dispatch from “a Victorian lady” shocked senseless by modern girls’ behaviour on a trip to London during the season: “Right in the public eye, and on the nose, a debutante from one of the best families will dab on powder – and as for rouge!” In another, she sent up the trope of the international dilettante (“His dressing gown came from Charvet – it was designed in triangles of orange and black. His cigarettes were imported from Benson and Hedges, his clothes were from Savile Row, his terrier came from Dublin and looked, in its cushioned basket, as though it wanted to go back.”) And in still another she caricatured the prevailing emperor’s-new-clothes approach to admiring the modern art that suddenly filled London’s galleries: “Symphonies in stone! Languors in lithograph! Or – thrilled – ‘WHAT a work!’ These are all safe phrases to be strewn round a strictly modern gallery like fresh flowers before a shrine. Naturally; when one doesn’t know what to say, one says quite the other thing. So shines a good deed in a naughty art world!”
Her masterpiece, however, might just be A Complete Set of Flappers: Types Without Which No Party Is Complete, from March 1926, when the bobbed, rouged figure was really gaining traction. As we reach the hinge of the 2020s, revisit the story in full, below.
The Full Back
Above, if you have the bad taste to look, you will observe the disturbing flapper, whose motto is “Back to Nature”. Her present partner, in search of a proper place to park his hand, gives an imitation of a harper harping on his harpy.
The Fade Away
No, readers, this is not what you think. The young lady, the better half of whom is protruding from the taxi, has not overestimated the strength of her head. She is one of those devastating persons who is subject to fainting spells and is forever subsiding on her poor escort.
The Cut Up
Annabelle is one of those little devils who start out to be the Life of the Party and is almost the death of it. After the fourth Bronx, she breaks into a Charleston which lasts, with intermissions for refreshments, until she is laid on her side in a dark room, usually in her hostess’s bedroom. She has a dreadful time trying to explain it all to The Man Who Thinks Her Sacred.
The Tennis Fiend
She leaps, she breathes, she hath her being – and he who would win her must return stroke for stroke, chop for chop, and twist for twist. The double-edged flaming sword of the angel who protects maidens is a charred poker when compared with the mean tennis racquet of this lady.
The Collector
Pearls and diamonds, diamonds and pearls, he loves me, he loves me not. Heaven help the wight who is fastened to a flapper like Gertrude, the gimme girl. Everything she sees she wants, especially if it is expensive, gems particularly.
The Go-Getter
Dorothy is too strong a character to ask for anything. Hers is always the final cocktail, the ultimate cigarette and the last word, leaving her boyfriend drinkless, smokeless and speechless. Scientists say this type is a cross between a standard vampire and a standard vacuum cleaner.
