Surely this is some scornful kind of Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to deny the French their beauty and their beauty-defining skill. Life clearly perceives the American alternatives and promotes the American style in overt deprecation of the French model.
Life understood that a sense of style could be initiated from a French example. The cover story of November 29, 1948, issue, for example, on dinner hats owes its sense of etiquette to Paris. Social history and customs pertained to fashion, but America was becoming different in a proud way in the very documents that Life offered. The famous Angelo Maso photograph of Barbara Hutton being barred from the front entrance of the Hotel Ritz in Paris from the May 27, 1946, issue is a classic confrontation of New World and Old. Hutton, wearing culottes, was not permitted to enter the Ritz despite the fact that she was at the time one of the richest women in the world. Whatever the specific protocol of the Ritz, Life was clearly on the side of the American and modern woman.
A glance at the August 29, 1949, cover reminds us how free the American girl is in Life and what a radiant, wholesome ideal she is. Life devoted great attention each fall to back-to-school and college fashions, perhaps less as a selling of the merchandise of clothing than an identifier of the seasonal change and of the aspirations conveyed in going to school. In 1949, two college-bound young women wear cotton caps, sweater, and shirt displaying a relative lack of jewelry and carefree hairstyles. The woman in the foreground wears the oxford-cloth button shirt we identify with borrowing from the boys. The 1949 look gives a very American patina of the past to the collegiate styles popular that year. Specific fashion notes for 1949 include a “potato bag” skirt by Carolyn Schnurer, the American sportswear designer. The flounce of a full skirt with petticoats may have emulated Dior’s New Look, but the material here is farm sacking, made with big patch pockets, and described with the admonition of the genuine roughness of the fabric. Silhouette by Dior, sensibility by Dogpatch.
Not only back-to-school, but even the glamour machine of Hollywood enjoyed Life’s dialectic between casual and sophisticated. For example, a December 7, 1953, cover showing Audrey Hepburn at home is almost as unpretentious and simple as the college co-eds. Hepburn talks on the telephone sitting on shag carpeting wearing a big shirt or blouse as top with barefeet and bare legs. Only a few years later this archetype would become the teenage girl talking on the telephone in the very American Bye Bye Birdie. In all fairness, though, it must be said that Life did allow for glimpses of glamour, whether they came from Paris or from Hollywood. The January 16, 1956, issue showed Grace Kelly, Academy Award winner for The Country Girl, in high Hollywood style befitting a princess. Life was also not above a little cheesecake as witnessed in the Sam Shaw photograph published September 27, 1954, of Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe filming their famous subway-grating scene from The Seven Year Itch on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street. And in the year of the Dior New Look, Life published on May 12, 1947, an Irving Penn photograph of the top models chiefly dressed in evening wear and looking very much like old-order high style.
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