ELLE, September 1950
My internet friend M., who is the world’s biggest appreciator of Jil Sander, told me recently: “You should be an archivist in the Kunstgewerbemuseum because you live in the past.” Me? Live in the past? I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Anyway. Let me present my latest purchase: ELLE magazine, 18 September 1950.
I found it on Vinted, priced at almost nothing. The paper has gone the color of milky tea and the cover is soft at the corners, you know, the way magazines from the 1950s get! On the front: a woman in a rust-colored belted suit, arms raised to hold a printed scarf against the wind, smiling at something just outside the frame. She looks delighted. I like her aura.
It is a September issue, which means it arrives trailing the full weight of fashion mythology: the September issue, the fattest, the most important, the one that tells you who you are supposed to be for the next twelve months. Did it carry this weight in 1950?
This issue is 44 pages and costs 30 francs. It contains: a fashion spread of practical autumn suits for city women, a readers’ letters column, a cinema gossip page, a mushroom foraging guide with recipes (the writer describes her preferred basket, her choice of knife, her technique for not bruising the chanterelles), children’s knitwear patterns, a crossword, a serial about famous lovers throughout history, and a girdle advertisement announcing, not without pride, la gaine du demi-siècle.
You know what I like? The magazine assumes its reader has a life!!! Not a lifestyle — a life!! She goes to the cinema and reads gossip about Michèle Morgan. She forages for mushrooms in autumn, or at least finds this interesting to read about. She has opinions about the best toothbrush, she does the crossword on Sunday…And the fashion pages simply exist inside this life.
Five years after the war, Paris seems to be reasserting itself as the place where a woman can be elegant and busy and intellectually curious and a little bit funny, all at once. This is the kind of woman I want to be, so perhaps I see what I want to see. But I don’t notice any aspiration being sold here. Just a very confident account of what a woman’s week looks like, with good clothes in it.
I don’t know who owned this before me. Someone kept it for 75 years, and I’d give a lot to know the story… Maybe they did the crossword in pencil and then erased it, or they cut out the knitwear pattern for their daughter’s winter wardrobe. And do you think they liked the cover girl’s smile, like I do?
M. is probably right about me. I do live in the past. But there are worse things than wanting to know what women were reading on an autumn Tuesday in 1950, and finding that it still makes complete sense and looks beautiful!
Thank you for reading, I hope you are well. xx
To Life — and us in it! 🫶
Interesting to read how the role of fashion has shifted x