Oh darling

Vogue 1950's

While researching a story today I came across this hilarious article which was published in Peterson's Magazine way back in 1861. I assume this was (like Vogue in it's early days), a sort of social gazette for young aristocratic women who wanted advice and assistance on how to be 'in style' at the time.

Here are some of my favourite excerpts...can you just imagine what these women would have to say about the Lady Gaga's and Paris Hilton's of the world today?

"Young ladies, when they get married, should not relax their habits of personal neatness and graceful deportment, always so charming and becoming in their girlish days, and which were thought indispensable then in aiding them to create an agreeable impression, and setting off, in the most engaging light, their natural advantages."

Vogue 1920's

"Nature for each has a different style, and each should choose what best becomes her, whether in her character of maid or matron. She should cultivate her taste by experiment and observation. She should educate the eye to the chase and beautiful, and thus she would become more competent to judge what is most judicious and tasteful for herself, without copying, as we are too prone to do, the dress of others, whose different style, manners, and appearance, render them wrong arbiters of the dress we wear."

Vogue cover, 1914

"Then, again, a great many women excuse their own carelessness by saying, 'Oh! It don't matter whether we make ourselves fine or not, our husbands never perceive the difference. They don't care a fig.' But the woman who acts on this shallow principle treats neither herself nor her husband with respect; she underrates her own importance."

Balmain in Vogue, 1940's