I’ve been doing this long enough to know that people had a lot of opinions about the direction of women’s fashion in the mid 1920s. So when I stumbled on this article and photo, it didn’t surprise me:
Douglas, Arizona paper, Aug 1926
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I don’t know which “doctors” weighed in on this, but these don’t seem like medical concerns. Either way, newspapers printed the itemized list of concerns and end by asking the reader directly: does she look all wrong to you?
This is all well and good, but it got me thinking about other public outrage I’ve seen in the newspapers, and while searching for those, I I found and even more dramatic one. Straight from the Pope.
Pope Pius XI: Wikimedia Commons circa 1932
Evening Herald Courier, Nov 3, 1926
That November, Pope Pius personally performed his own niece's wedding at the Vatican. Priceless gifts, jewelry, silk, an enormous ceremony. And in the middle of it, he used the occasion to warn the newlyweds that modern fashion was "undermining marriage itself." Not a comment on the bride's own dress, she wore white crepe romain with a long train, nothing described as scandalous. Just a general grievance, aired at his family's wedding.
And apparently he was just workshopping material at the wedding, because six weeks later, he said it again. Publicly, this time, to 1,000 members of Rome's Catholic Men's Association. Modern styles, he said, were "ugly, ruinous," even "catastrophic," irreverent "to human dignity" and "to body and soul."
New Castle News, Dec 17, 1926
Doctors said too tight. The Pope said too immoral. Nobody agreed on what, exactly, was wrong with a dress that year. But everyone seemed awfully convinced something was. Seems cool to me:
Moline Daily Dispatch, Nov 13, 1926
Also in the Papers: The "Beautiful Bones" Problem
While all this was happening, a different columnist was busy prescribing the opposite complaint. Mme Qui Vive's beauty column that October laid out fashion's "ideal figure" in oddly precise terms: proportioned to exactly eight head-lengths, knees at the halfway point between hip and floor, wrists reaching exactly to the hairline when the arm is raised. The column blamed this standard for what it called a "reducing frenzy" sending women to "count their calories and live on nothing a day."
Ledger Star, Oct 18, 1926
So to recap: “doctors” said the clothes were unhealthy, beauty columnists said the body underneath needed fixing to fit the clothes, and the Pope said the whole enterprise was a threat to marriage. Welcome to 1926.
Cutting Room Floor
The Pope's wedding gifts to his niece were specific and pointed: four bookcases, 25 volumes each, personally selected by him, on the duties of a Christian wife and mother. Also two silver chests, one holding three rings, the other an "elaborately matched rope of oriental pearls."
The groom, Marquis Eduardo Persichetti, was secretary of the Nicaraguan legation to the Holy See and had served as an Italian cavalry officer in the war.
Witnesses at the ceremony included a count, a prince, and two ambassadors. The entire diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican attended. Sounds like just the right audience for an airing of grievances (Frank Costanza voice* “I got a lot of problems with you people!”)
The honeymoon began in Florence.
The woman photographed for the "She's All Wrong" illustration is named in the caption, Mary Jane Wright, and is described as having posed for the piece rather than being caught in it. Lucky gal.
See you tomorrow. – Chris
Sources
Douglas, Arizona newspaper, August 1926
Evening Herald Courier, November 3, 1926
Ledger Star, October 18, 1926
Moline Daily Dispatch, November 13, 1926
New Castle News, December 17, 1926
One placeholder: I don't have a confirmed paper name for the "She's All Wrong" clipping beyond "Douglas, Arizona" from the visible masthead fragment. If you have the full paper name, send it over and I'll correct the source line.