This will always remain my favorite vintage lesbian art… Do I even have to break it down for you?
I just thought it was a mermaid trapped under ice
the caption says “Are Parisian women becoming more thrifty? Seeing a lot of different types of panties this year!”
presumably half those girls are commando or wearing thongs. this is totally lesbian pinup ads.
If it were just a mermaid trapped under ice, there would be no reason all the skaters above the ice are wearing skirts and are presumably women. also look at that mermaid’s smile she knows what’s up.
I feel the need to correct the French translation, primarily because I’m garbage, but also because the actual translation has a significantly different meaning than what is written above.
The French says, “La Parisienne deviendrait elle économe ? … On voit beaucoup moins de pantalons, cette année ?” “Are Parisian women becoming thrifty? Seeing much fewer pant(ie)s this year!”
I know I’ve reblogged this 5000x before but 1. Never with that corrected translation and 2. I don’t care
this is a great ad but how is she smoking under water?
Lesbian mermaid magic
The cigarette indicates it’s sexual too.
Although I agree that it being usable underwater is a baffling detail
I think the cigarette is to make damn sure you know it’s sexual.
Cigarettes were often used in movies and art to indicate that that woman is a lesbian!
Also see how she has 2 fins not one? It symbolises trousers instead of a skirt, another way to hint at the woman being a lesbian in artwork at the time.
I’m just incredibly relived for the corrected translation, the nonsensical-ness of ‘thrifty = more pants’ has troubled me for a while now.
GUYS.
Although it is made to look like a cigarette–look at the box next to her. It’s a sardine box. She is holding her last sardine like a cigarette. So it actually makes more sense than a cigarette under water….
(Obviously the sexy cigarette imagery is still there, it’s just a clever way to work around the water bit)
this post is just the gift that keeps on giving.
I can’t even imagine being SO STRAIGHT that I’d think this was “just a mermaid trapped under ice” smh
it’s sort of funny that the current cultural idea of the flapper dates not from the 1920s, but the 1950s when costume designers took the radical, gender-fluid, sexual, sexually liberated ideas and fashions of the 20s and made them sexy. as in sexual objectifying.
because 1950s and fuck female agency.
If you would like, I would love to hear more about this. What, exactly, happened, and what was the true 1920s aesthetic, untainted by 50s views?
hokay. so it’s the 1950s and it’s the heyday of the studio system and writers and movie makers (and audiences) want rom coms and frolicking films and lighthearted fun, but there’s just one problem.
WWII
but that was the 1940s! you say
you’re right.
but in order to set a film in the 1950s, writers and film makers have to establish what the male lead character did during the war or risk it coming across like he didn’t, well, serve. can’t have a shirker or a coward and rejected for medical reasons really doesn’t fly in the 1950s. and there’s only so many times you can write about soldiers and sailors and airmen and the occasional spy before it starts to become stale. and it doesn’t terribly fit with the fluffy writing because, well, war and death and tens of millions of people dead. contemporary films more fall in the line of what we now call film noir. men and women who have been damaged by war, but that’s another topic.
sooooo, you do period pieces. no one wants to do the 1930s because that’s the great depression. so 1920s. frolicking and gay and fabulous!
(Great War, what Great War?)
but the thing is, the 1920s, especially in Paris and Berlin, were a massively transgressive, reversal, and experimental time period in art, fashion, society, and all over. but only a little bit in america because honestly we were barely touched by wwi so it’s not like we’re partying to forget an entire generation of young men killed off and entire towns wiped off the face of the earth using weapons the likes of which had never been seen before. the us as a whole mostly heard about sarin gas, not see it poison entire landscapes and men and animals dropped to the ground and die in truly horrific ways.
the europe that emerged from wwi was massively shell shocked, angry, and living in a surreal dream of everything being upwards and backwards and live now because tomorrow you may die and it’s all nonsense anyway. it’s a world in which surrealism and dadaism and german expressionism make sense because fuck it all.
you get repudiation of the old, experimentation, deliberate reversals, transgressive behavior, and if there’s an envelope to push, you tear it open. France calls the 1920s “Années folles”, the crazy years.
the things we’re doing now, with fluidity and experimentation and exploration of gender and sexuality and presentation? the 1920s did that already. it’s drag and androgyny and blatant homosexuality. it’s extramarital affairs and sex before or without marriage, it’s rejection of marriage as an idea and an institution, it’s playing with gender and gender roles and working women and unrestrained art and
it’s everything the 1950s hated. or more accurately: absolutely terrified of.
the flappers of the 1920s went to college and cut their hair to repudiate a century of a woman’s hair being her crowning glory. they wore obvious makeup and makeup in ways that are not terribly appealing now and weren’t terribly appealing then, but they signaled you were part of the tribe.
they were women who wanted independence and personal fulfillment.
“She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.“
so the 1950s didn’t want that. they wanted films with dancing and chorus lines and pretty girls to be looked at. they wanted spaghetti straps and fringed dresses that moved pretty when the chorus girls danced.
1920s fringe doesn’t. 1920s fringe is made of silk, incredibly dense, incredibly heavy, sewn on individually by hand, and rather delicate. the all-over fringe dress didn’t exist until the 1950s invention of nylon and continuous loops that could be sewn on in costume workshops by the mile on machines.
(this is before “vintage” exists. to the 1950s, the 1920s (or earlier) wasn’t vintage, it was old-fashioned. démodé. out of style. last last last last last season.)
1950s 1920s-set movies have clothes that are the 1950s take on it. the dresses have a dropped waist, but they’re form-fitting, figure-revealing. the actresses are pretty clearly wearing bras and 50s girdles under them a lot of the time. they’re not
the woman on the far left is basically wearing a man’s suit with a skirt. la garçonne. some women went full-out and wore pants. you could be arrested for that. they were. still wore pants. and pyjama ensembles in silk and loud prints.
or class photo of ‘25
or even
not that 1920s dresses could be sexy or sexual; they often were. i’ve seen 20s dresses that were basically sideless and held together with straps. but it’s sort of like how the mini skirt went from being a thing of sexual liberation to an item of sexual objectification.
it’s ownership and it’s agency and it’s hard to put a name or finger on it, but you just know. sex goddess versus sex icon.
Forgive me for adding to this, OP, but my favorite movie of all time is Singin’ in the Rain, a 1952 film set in 1927. If you look into the behind-the-scenes stuff about the costuming, the people involved talk a lot about how difficult it was because, quite frankly, 20s fashion was seen as laughably ugly by 50s standards. For them, it was what their parents wore before they were born, so think of just the worst 70s or 80s fashion you can imagine and trying to look glamorous in that. (Or for some of you tumblr kids, the 90s, but I’m here to tell you we looked great in that decade.) The closest they got is probably this:
Even here, Debbie Reynolds’s dress has a sheer overlay so you can see that really rigid, curvy 50s silhouette underneath it.
(Also, the ideal female body type was totally different and fashion hung on those frames very differently – flat and athletic and boyish in the 20s, stacked in the 50s. There’s a joke in the movie version of Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967, set in 1922) where Millie laments that her “fronts” are too “full” to let her long string of beads lie flat against her chest – the joke being that no woman would want to be smaller-busted.)
Anyway, I always thought that contrast between the fashion of the two decades and how the 50s were left struggling to interpret such a different aesthetic in a way that their audiences would find beautiful was fascinating, but I never thought about how that 50s reaction of “this is laughably ugly” might stem from a place of “this is alarmingly androgynous and non-constrictive and not designed for the male gaze.” LET KATHY SELDEN WEAR PANTS AND LIVE IN SIN.
This comes at a great time because my alma mater wants to have a flapper themed jubilee with the gowns and beads and shit, and I am a grumpy queer feminist alumna who will not hesitate to throw this stuff their way.
Steel Phoenix Studios 