The Great Depression and World War II bookended the 1930s, but fashion flourished anyway during this decade. Glamorous Hollywood screen stars inspired new looks for women, men, and even children. Inexpensive fabrics, affordable catalog clothing, and homespun ingenuity let anyone copy styles previously worn by the wealthy.
The young, boyish silhouette of 1920s women evolved into a conservative, sophisticated shape in the 1930s. The ideal, popular profile was tall and thin, with strong shoulders and slim hips.
At home or in public, women most commonly wore dresses with wide shoulders; puffy sleeves; modest necklines; higher, belted waistlines; and mid-calf flared hemlines. Frilly bows, ruffles, buttons, and other details often decorated dresses.
Housewives wore practical house dresses at home, often homemade from colorful printed cotton (including flour and feed sack fabric). Day dresses for wearing in public were more tailored and elegant, often made from silk or rayon crepe. Some women wore blouses with skirts.
Formal dresses most dramatically displayed the decade’s willowy, elegant silhouette. Evening gowns in fluid fabrics were cut on the bias to create flowing, figure-hugging lines that reached the floor. Popular fabrics included satin, rayon, and chiffon.
Take a look at these found photos to see what women wore from the 1930s.
If you grew up in the 1970s, chances are you had a rockin’ sense of style. Adults were donning leisure suits and bell bottoms, and stores adapted those trends to fit their littlest costumers, too.
At that time, it was impossible not to look good. But looking back, some of the best styles seem a bit ridiculous. Who could forget some of these funky styles? Take a look at these vintage photos to see what kids looked like from the 1970s.
The 1970s (pronounced “nineteen-seventies”; commonly shortened to the “Seventies” or the “’70s”) was a decade that began on January 1, 1970, and ended on December 31, 1979.
In the 21st century, historians have increasingly portrayed the 1970s as a “pivot of change” in world history, focusing especially on the economic upheavals that followed the end of the postwar economic boom. On a global scale, it was characterized by frequent coups, domestic conflicts and civil wars, and various political upheaval and armed conflicts which arose from or were related to decolonization, and the global struggle between the West, the Warsaw Pact, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Many regions had periods of high-intensity conflict, notably Southeast Asia, the Mideast, and Africa.
In the Western world, social progressive values that began in the 1960s, such as increasing political awareness and economic liberty of women, continued to grow. In the United Kingdom, the 1979 election resulted in the victory of its Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, the first female British Prime Minister. Industrialized countries experienced an economic recession due to an oil crisis caused by oil embargoes by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. The crisis saw the first instance of stagflation which began a political and economic trend of the replacement of Keynesian economic theory with neoliberal economic theory, with the first neoliberal governments being created in Chile, where a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet took place in 1973.
The 1970s was also an era of great technological and scientific advances; since the appearance of the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004 in 1971, the decade was characterised by a profound transformation of computing units – by then rudimentary, spacious machines – into the realm of portability and home accessibility.
On the other hand, there were also great advances in fields such as physics, which saw the consolidation of Quantum Field Theory at the end of the decade, mainly thanks to the confirmation of the existence of quarks and the detection of the first gauge bosons in addition to the photon, the Z boson and the gluon, part of what was christened in 1975 as the Standard Model.
Novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term “ ’Me’ decade” in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, published by New York Magazine in August 1976 referring to the 1970s. The term describes a general new attitude of Americans towards atomized individualism and away from communitarianism, in clear contrast with the 1960s.
In Asia, affairs regarding the People’s Republic of China changed significantly following the recognition of the PRC by the United Nations, the death of Mao Zedong and the beginning of market liberalization by Mao’s successors. Despite facing an oil crisis due to the OPEC embargo, the economy of Japan witnessed a large boom in this period, overtaking the economy of West Germany to become the second-largest in the world. The United States withdrew its military forces from their previous involvement in the Vietnam War, which had grown enormously unpopular. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which led to an ongoing war for ten years.
The 1970s saw an initial increase in violence in the Middle East as Egypt and Syria declared war on Israel, but in the late 1970s, the situation in the Middle East was fundamentally altered when Egypt signed the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty. Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, was instrumental in the event and consequently became extremely unpopular in the Arab world and the wider Muslim world. Political tensions in Iran exploded with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which overthrew the Authoritarian Pahlavi dynasty and established an even more authoritarian Islamic republic under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Africa saw further decolonization in the decade, with Angola and Mozambique gaining their independence in 1975 from the Portuguese Empire after the restoration of democracy in Portugal. The continent was, however, plagued by endemic military coups, with the long-reigning Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie being removed, civil wars and famine.
The economies of much of the developing world continued to make steady progress in the early 1970s because of the Green Revolution. However, their economic growth was slowed by the oil crisis, although it boomed afterwards. (Wikipedia)
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Winter, Fifth Avenue is a black and white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1893. The photograph was made at the corner of the Fifth Avenue and the 35th Street in New York. It was one of the first pictures that Stieglitz took using a more practical hand camera after his return from Europe.
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York is a cathedral city and unitary authority area, at the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss, in England. It is the head city of historic Yorkshire and was a county corporate, outside of the county’s council and the ridings. The city has long-standing buildings and structures, such as a minster, castle and ancient city walls.
The city was founded by the Romans as Eboracum in 71 AD. It became the capital of the Roman province of Britannia Inferior, and later of the kingdoms of Deira, Northumbria and Jórvík. In the Middle Ages, York grew as a major wool trading centre and became the capital of the northern ecclesiastical province of the Church of England, a role it has retained. In the 19th century, York became a major hub of the railway network and a confectionery manufacturing centre, a status it maintained well into the 20th century. During the Second World War, York was bombed as part of the Baedeker Blitz. Although less affected by bombing than other northern cities, several historic buildings were gutted and restoration efforts continued into the 1960s.
These gorgeous color slides were taken in 1968 and later collected by Martin Snelling, an owner of a brilliant archive of vintage photographs. Take a look:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, according to the well-known saying. Yet it is only in the present day that our eyes need to make some effort to find beauty in so many faces. When it comes to women of the past, their appearance was unquestionably pure. One can be sure — this beauty is as real as it gets.
With Edwardian era, that has lasted from 1900 to 1912 came many life improvements that we still use today, such as electricity, cars, and vacuum cleaners, but it has also given us a fair share of bizarre facts, most of them concerning women.
According to sources, beautiful women of the Edwardian Era used Belladonna, a highly poisonous and even lethal plant, drops to make their pupils dilate, making the women look aroused. They have also smeared their faces with lead cream to make them look pale. And a faint smell of dame’s sweat was deemed very desirable by young gentlemen and even got a name as ‘bouquet de corsage’ (literally ‘smells of the bodice’).
In spite of these absurd beauty trends, the era gave us some of the most beautiful women and emancipated ladies, here we gathered a gallery of 40 vintage portraits of beautiful women from between the 1900s to 1910s:
Born 1916 in Port Arthur, Texas, American actress Evelyn Keyes came out to Hollywood by age 18 as a chorus girl and was introduced to Cecil B. DeMille who in her own words “signed me to a personal contract without even making a test”.
After a handful of B movies at Paramount Pictures, Keyes landed a minor role in Gone with the Wind (1939), that of Scarlett O’Hara’s sister Suellen. (She was later interviewed for the 1988 documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind).
Columbia Pictures signed her to a contract. In 1941, Keyes played an ingenue in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. She spent most of the early 1940s playing leads in many of Columbia’s B dramas and mysteries. Appeared as the female lead in Columbia’s blockbuster hit The Jolson Story (1946), she followed this up with an enjoyable minor screwball comedy, The Mating of Millie. She was then in a 1949 role as Kathy Flannigan in Mrs. Mike.
Keyes’ last major film role was a small part as Tom Ewell’s vacationing wife in The Seven Year Itch (1955), which starred Marilyn Monroe. Keyes officially retired in 1956, but continued to act. She died in in 2008 from uterine cancer at the Pepper Estates in Montecito, California, aged 91.
Take a look at these vintage photos to see the beauty of young Evelyn Keyes in the 1930s and 1940s.
The legends surrounding Ernest Hemingway and his days at war — from World War I to the Spanish Civil War, are often recounted, but when he wasn’t risking his life on the battlefield or writing, he was likely hunting or fishing.
At four years old, Hemingway learned to fish, hunt and camp from his father, as the family would frequently spend time at their cabin in Northern Michigan. Early experiences would shape his understanding of the natural world and contribute to the themes present in much of his writing, particularly his Nick Adams short stories.
While hunting was a passion, it was fishing that Hemingway was known for, and for good reason. He managed to live the life of a successful journalist and writer while also making serious contributions to the world of fishing. He fished for trout in the streams of Michigan, Germany and Spain, and for sportfish in the Gulf of Mexico.
Hemingway spent a lot of time on his 38-foot fishing boat Pilar, so much that it would heavily influence his writing, especially in novels like Islands in the Streams and To Have and Have Not, where much of the action takes place on a small fishing boat.
Hemingway himself developed theories and techniques in fishing, like solving the “apple coring” problem with tuna, where sharks would attack the tired fish during the lengthy landing times. Hemingway would keep constant pressure on the tuna, focusing on getting it to the boat as fast as possible instead of letting it tire, which was the accepted method of the day.
He tried everything from transferring the fight to a smaller boat to shooting attacking sharks with his Thompson sub machine gun as the hooked tuna approached the boat. He was the first person on record to boat an undamaged giant tuna.
Once, he caught a marlin that was estimated to have been over 1,000 pounds before sharks reached it. He learned the hard way that by shooting the sharks he released blood into the water and attracted more sharks, which took most of the marlin’s body. This tale is probably the basis for the novel The Old Man and the Sea.
In the eighties, Eric Clapton was trying to quit drugs and alcohol. Naturally, he got really into clothes and women. “I’d always loved clothes, and that became a huge interest for me,” he told Classic Rock in 2016.
Clapton meant it when he said he’d always been really into clothes: His 1970s stage ensembles included overalls and a bucket hat made from a flour bag, for example, and his former bandmates have spoken to his obsession with getting the look. But in the mid-1980s, he made a conscious effort to pivot away from his rock-dude image of vests and blouses and clean up his act a bit. So he turned to Armani and Versace. “I was really interested in Italian stuff,” he told Classic Rock. “I met and loved this lovely Italian lady, we had a child, and I met Giorgio Armani and I met Gianni Versace.”
Throughout the 1980s, he almost exclusively wore the two Italian greats and went all the way in, developing a look as rock-and-roll gigolo. He appeared onstage and in publicity photographs in Versace’s gangster-fashionisto tailoring—“revolutionary, but simple at the same time,” as he wrote in his 2007 biography—and Armani’s sexy cool-guy suits, with their soft shoulders and loong jackets. He liked the energy and the romance of it, he said: “English culture, and fashion, was always much more tweedy and introverted, so when I finally got to Italy in the mid-eighties I was overwhelmed by the vivacity of it all, and the colors and the flamboyance of everything, and I was sucked in, I really loved it.”
But in the early 1990s, he pumped the brakes on the bella figura thing for a bit, and this is where we must begin to pay close attention. If Clapton has been eager to speak on Armani mania, this much more bizarre and rewarding period is less documented. The British press, with its enviable flair for the poetic, has been eager to connect this makeover with his newfound sobriety and 1989 “comeback album” Journeyman, referring to his 1980s period as one defined by “heroin, alcohol, and dodgy Armani suits” and expressing relief later that “the suits have been binned in favor] of jeans, [and] his entire Armani-period output has been trashed.” Instead, The Telegraph wrote, “with his weatherbeaten, beardy visage, wire-rimmed specs and tufty, bed-head hair, he could pass now as a regular middle England dad, the sort you would hardly notice in a DIY superstore, or a country high street.”
