Unsafe At Any Speed

So this is precisely what it looks like: A car with a record player mounted under the dash. They were popular options in the 1950s when clear channel radio stations were still limited and when commuting from your nascent suburban community into the city for work was still new and exciting. The Philips version pictured above-bottom seems to work a bit like a CD player in that it sucks the disc in, but most of the devices required drivers to actually drop the needle on the record. Since we can hardly be trusted to keep control of our cocktail while flipping the record (much less positioning the needle), this seems like a particularly bad idea.

File this alongside the SPCA-unapproved dog riding sack in the "History of Bad Ideas: The Eisenhower Years"

The World's First Fashion Bloggers

Recently, a Mark Twain biographer dubbed the noted 19th century humorist "the world's first blogger." According to Robert Hirst, Twain's autobiographical technique was not unlike that of contemporary bloggers, who, Hirst notes, tend to eschew chronology in favor of informal, meandering recollection. Like a fish without a bicycle, Twain was 'a blogger without a web.' Perhaps the same can be said, then, of the women pictured above. Just a bunch of proto fashion bloggers without a cable modem or a scrap of Modcloth. Sounds kinda dreamy, right?

Vintage Bad Hair Day

Or, from the looks of those bangs, vintage Bad Hair Month.

YOU Decide!

{image via Jet}

Is that thing over the model's bust area...

a) a censor bar

b) a bikini top

c) a repurposed thong

If you guessed "b," congratulations! Your 1970s fashion IQ is more impressive than Barry Gibb's vocal range.

Things to do with a Thong

Back in 2009, Cosmo ran a typically hard-hitting piece titled "Fun Little Tricks Guys Love" which effectively beat Readymade at its own game by suggesting that women repurpose their thong underwear into a ponytail tie in order to get things cooking in the bedroom. (You see, straight men are apparently so sensitive to the presence of thong underwear in a room that they can be influenced by its intrinsic powers even as it serves a completely unsexy, transmogrified function like hair collection! Whoa!) Here are five more ways to repurpose your thongs for a successful Date Night, Cosmo-style:

5. Sexy Headband!

4. Sexy Bracelet!

3. Sexy Necklace!

2. Sexy Ring!

1. Sexy Tourniquet!

(Tune in next month for seven secrets to a successful bath, and our top five tricks for passing gas silently at the office!)

On Pins & Needles (In Your Skin)

Can anyone explain to us the above image from a 1960 Angel Face Cosmetics advertisement? It would appear that the model's brooch is anchored to her bare flesh, but surely this isn't the case! Surely she's not suffering that much to look "lovely in lime" and "marvelous in mauve!" Right?!

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Of Women & Clowns

Photoshop and plastic surgery aren't the only means by which beauty has been standardized. As the rather fadish stencil products featured above and below suggest, low-tech practices of facial homogenization have long worked in concert with more expensive and prominent techniques to help manufacture and maintain a particular visual grammar of middle-class feminine beauty. That some of these practices resemble those used by professional clowns should be of no surprise to anyone vaguely familiar with the history of patriarchy (or clowns).

Training the 1950s Tween in the Ways of Erotic Objectification

We don't recall ever having a 'training bra,' or a 'psychological need' that went unsatisfied for one, but then again, we never enjoyed cinematic, half-clothed embraces near the window with our mother as 'beTweenagers,' either. In spite of this, we somehow learned the importance of eroticizing our breasts by pushing them up into perfectly rotund and symmetrical masses on our chest. And THANK GOD, too, because otherwise we might look like the unfortunate slob pictured below sans Titzling.

Swimsuit Contests Then And Now

Then:

Now:

Then:

Now:

Then:

Now:

(And here we thought Ludacris preferred 'a lady in the streets...')

Bad Hair of the 'Good War': Get The Look!

During WWII, supporting the Allies on the homefront meant more than merely tying a yellow ribbon around your fruit trees. It also meant purchasing bonds, conserving rubber and walking around town with Hobby Lobby birds stuck in your updo like it was no. big. deal.

A Brief History of Smoking Babies

2010:

1951 (via Life):

Even smoking babies are apparently more mature than they used to be; Indonesian Baby was up to two packs a day when the fuzz snatched his fags.

The Fashion of the Future Today!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Until recently, we thought adult jumpers and gladiator sandals were the contemporary equivalent of the midi--i.e., elaborate jokes crafted by the naturally-awful CEOs of Urban Outfitters and American Apparel at the expense of fashion-forward women worldwide. As it turns out, though, these items have been the stuff of fashion fantasy since the early 1950s when at least one stylist working on a Life pictorial about the 'future of women's fashion' decided they were indeed our fashion destiny. Guess you can't fight fate.

Vintage Trompe l'Oeil a la Hermes

We're not sure what's more amazing: These Herbert Sondheim-for-Hermes dresses, or the last model's 22" waist.

1952 Retail price ~ $29 (or, $232 today).

The Midi Skirt: Birth Of A Bad Idea

Above: (Top) Today show host Barbara Walters advocates on behalf of the midi while a mini-skirted midi detractor and James Brady of Women's Wear Daily look on. (Bottom Left) A soap star issues her silent protest against the new skirt length sweeping the nation--and her wardrobe department (Bottom Reft) A woman in the formerly fashionable mini holds up a midi-length skirt in the mirror. (via Life, 1970)

1970 was a big year. Angela Davis was fired from UCLA for being a communist, bicycles were finally permitted to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, and the mini skirt was declared totally and utterly dead by the editors of Women's Wear Daily. In its place emerged what would become known as the 'midi' (or, as many would have it, 'the worst thing to happen to women's legs since the Birkenstock'). Despite the appearance of such anti-midi groups as GAMS (Girls/Guys Against More Skirt) and FADD (Fight Against Dictating Designers), designers and department stores pushed forward with the trend, secure (apparently) in the knowledge that desperately fashionable women would help them weather the storm of resentment. As Marshall Field President Charles W. Folds condescendingly put it in a 1970 Life interview, "There'll always be that strange woman, God bless her, who wants to be the first out of the hen coop with the latest oddity. She'll go to any length to be au courant and we make a lot of money because of her."

(Kinda makes you crave a Virginia Slim, don't it?)

She'll Get You There

Delighted, I suppose, not to live in a time when airlines draft beguiling women to convince a primarily male clientele of the safety and comfort of their flying death tubes. Not naive enough, however, to think that the image of 'woman as vessel (of sexual pleasure for men and maternal containment for mankind)' has lost--or will lose--its symbolic currency.

Case in point:

When Your "Personal Massager" Was Your Doctor

We read hundreds of books during graduate school, but none stuck with us quite as much as Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (2001). We recently flipped through it again, and had a nice chuckle at the thought of 'hysterical' (read: sexually unsatisfied) women achieving great 'relief' from physician-administered 'vibration treatment.' As Maines details, physicians didn't particularly like to offer this very popular therapy (knowing, presumably, the very carnal source of their patients' relief), so it was with much joy that they began recommending handheld 'personal massagers' upon their appearance in the early 1910s. Below are two images and an excerpt from a 1908 physician's manual on vibration therapy, or what Maines cheekily calls 'the job nobody wanted.'

Egregious Mad Men History Gaffe

Whoops!: In season 1, episode 6, Joan implies to Peggy that she need not personally thank Don for her new copywriting gig by motioning to her own comely face and remarking, "You know what they say, the medium is the message." A clever reference, for sure, but rather unfortunately anachronistic; they didn't start saying this until four years later, after it was coined by Marshall McLuhan in his renowned 1964 book Understanding Media.

(At last, our advanced degree in American media and culture pays off. Makes the tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt totally worth it. Yep.)

Helmets & Ringlets (Or, "The Future")

In 1939, Life asked Hollywood imagineers to dream up "The Girl of Tomorrow." Quite predictably (the future, after all, always looks the same), they envisioned us wearing "wire eyelashes," "indelible lipstick that lasts two weeks" and tight ringlet hairstyles protected by bulbous celluloid helmets. Instead, of course, we're injecting sausage poison into our frown lines, gluing synthetic hair to our scalps and sewing sacs of salt water into our bosoms--a reality so grotesquely unimaginable, I'm not surprised they missed the mark back in '39.

The Way We Were

[ via Life (1946) ]

Dressing For Your Body Type c. Late 19th Century