A few nights ago I went to dinner at a friend’s house, up on Barclay street. (See how democratic I am, at heart? I even pay social calls in Barclay street.) We had a very nice evening out on the back porch, gossiped and listened to a few records.
My friend on Barclay street collects odd things. Nothing too weird, but I still lump them under “perversiana”. He likes goofy off-brand radios, cheesy “men’s novels” from the ‘50s, and has a big framed picture of an Art-Moderne style insane asylum hanging on the living room wall.
He also has, as a new addition, a nice little studio picture of two daintily-posed women, circa 1924.
Unfortunately, they are two of the homelier women God ever created.
Now, admittedly, the fashions of the 1920s, while dear to my heart, were VERY unkind fashions. If one did not have the perfect figure to fit them, one looked like warmed-over cat barf. The perfect figure to fit the fashions involved an excessively slim figure with a small (but not nonexistent) bust, practically nonexistent hips, and long, perfect legs—not too curvy, thanks, and ankles the size of the stem on a Martini glass.
If a woman is fortunate enough to possess such a figure—reference Clara Bow and Alice White—the styles of the era are magnetic. For the other 99.7% of the world, they sucked. The acres of cloth yardage required by Victorian and Edwardian fashion allowed a woman to cloak any deficiencies under a surfeit of flounces, and later ‘30s and ‘40s modes accentuated any natural curves and made just plain fat LOOK like curves.
These poor girls in that photograph looked like the human version of those rib roasts with little paper frills. Both of them had particularly unattractive faces, which were only accentuated by the bobbed Utz Potato Chip Girl hairstyle of the day. Their dresses—well, maybe if they’d shopped at a big city department store, they’d have done better, but these were obviously cranked out on Mom’s Singer to duplicate the latest style.
I do pity the poor girls. They were obviously trying their damnedest to look hot according to the latest style, which just happened to be unflattering to them.
But I do wonder what people will think when they see the photographs that we prize today. What will future generations think when they see my college-age pictures? Sure, my evening clothes are the same style that men’s evening clothes have been for the last hundred years, but my hair looks like the revenge of 1988. (It WAS 1988.) What about my dates, wearing big poofy sleeves? Will there be a time when my fairly stodgy polo shirts and khaki shorts will just seem idiotic? And why, FuturoWorld will think, did this guy take about nine million pictures of a grey-and-white cat?
The most alarming aspect of photographs is the ultimate anonymity. As long as I’m alive, I’ll know who the people in my pictures, and my family’s pictures, are. I know why I took nine million pictures of Misty the Wonder Cat.
Is there anyone left, though, who can identify those two homely—but obviously friendly and happy—girls in that picture now hanging in a dining room on Barclay street that they never saw while they were alive?