Again in 1936, Barbara Phillips was a 21-year-old nurse who longed to alter her life. She’d gone to nursing college not as a result of she had any nice want to assist the sick, she admitted, however as a result of she thought “nurses had solely to raise one languid determine to have fabulous salaries compelled upon them.” As an alternative, she discovered herself working lengthy hours for “a quite small pittance” and dreaming of a brand new profession.
Phillips wished to be an actress. However she’d had no luck at auditions, and she or he realized she had an enormous drawback. She was, by her personal description, “as homely as a hedgehog.”
Then she had an inspiration. That summer season, she had learn a sequence of articles in Mademoiselle journal about how Paramount Studios make-up artist Eddie Senz (“a Michaelangelo of make-up”) and different magnificence consultants made Hollywood stars look their finest. Known as the “Make the Most of Your self marketing campaign,” the sequence was supposed to present readers “a whole course” they may observe at dwelling.
Phillips had a greater thought.
She wrote a letter to Mademoiselle and begged for private consideration. Fearing a future as “a frigid outdated maid with a two-room house,” she appealed to the editors’ sympathy and delight. “Don’t you assume it could be a feather in your cap in case you could possibly be the one who modified this very ugly duckling into even a pale pink swan?” she wrote. “If in case you have any type of Pygmalion in you, please be a sport and assist me out.”
Her audacious proposal labored. Within the November 1936 difficulty of Mademoiselle, Phillips appeared because the first-ever topic of a before-and-after journal makeover.
Kinds have developed, and waistlines have grown, however the glamour of these before-and-after pictures hasn’t modified considerably in three-quarters of a century. You could be immediately lovely, a makeover guarantees, and more true to your interior superb. An outer change can result in a greater life. All it’s a must to do is belief specialists who can see your distinctive potential, know the correct tips, and dedicate their abilities to revealing or creating the brand new you.
That’s the distinction between getting a makeover and simply having a bunch of magnificence therapies on the similar time. On a standard journey to the hairdresser or the cosmetics counter, the consultants ask you what you need. With a makeover, they let you know what you want. Their experience makes the brand new look appear easy, like magic, particularly once you simply see before-and-after images in {a magazine} or the “reveal” scene on a TV present and miss the angst, ache, or sophisticated preparations.
Glamour all the time comprises a component of phantasm; the phrase glamour initially meant a literal magic spell that made issues look higher than they actually had been. Within the case of makeovers, what’s hidden are all of the conflicts created by trusting your look to another person.
For most individuals, a makeover isn’t a real-life expertise however quite an escapist fantasy loved whereas studying magazines or watching motion pictures or actuality reveals. Most of us don’t actually need to radically rework our look. Our identities are too wrapped up in how we glance.
However Phillips yearned for some bossy magnificence instruction. On a scorching summer season Saturday, she met with the editors of Mademoiselle in New York and agreed to function a “human guinea pig, a laboratory specimen to be analyzed, dissected, polished up piece by piece and reassembled.” The purpose was to show that the journal’s magnificence suggestions actually labored. “If Barbara Phillips could possibly be reworked,” she defined in an article about her expertise, “so may anybody.”
A squadron of specialists spent the next week remolding her look. “We’ll do a job on you, all proper,” promised Senz, the make-up artist. (On the finish of World Conflict II, this grasp of transformation would advise the U.S. authorities on how Hitler would possibly disguise himself to elude seize). After brusquely diagnosing Phillips’s flaws, Senz resculpted the planes of her lengthy face with cosmetics, plucked away her eyebrows and drew in new ones, and gave her monumental false eyelashes. Since there wasn’t time to develop out her scraggly bob, she additionally obtained a custom-made wig in a classy perm, including fullness to her slim head.
A dentist capped her crooked overbite, and she or he deserted her glasses. Designer Marie de Narde (who later left style after marrying actor Jack Lord of Hawaii 5-O fame) created a night robe that, with “some miraculous basis work by Finest and Firm,” a Fifth Avenue retailer, disguised Phillips’s lack of curves. She even had speech classes to enhance her high-pitched, “smothered” voice.
On the finish of the week, Phillips emerged wanting much less like a gawky farm woman and extra like a chic star. “A stranger was gazing at me out of the mirror,” she wrote. “Her face was full and rounded, her lips full and extensive, her even, straight tooth gleamed….I didn’t really feel like Barbara Phillips, and definitely, I didn’t appear to be her.”
Her article ended with a decision to maintain up her new look. “No midnight bell, I hope, for this Cinderella,” she wrote.
Because it turned out, nevertheless, her adventures as a glamour woman had been merely an gratifying second of creativeness and escape. Phillips didn’t turn out to be a star of stage or display screen. The truth is, because the Mademoiselle difficulty hit newsstands, Time reported that “final week Miss Phillips was again in Boston, wanting as soon as extra the best way God made her.” (Confirming the Time report, the 1940 Census data a 25-year-old Barbara E. Phillips dwelling in Boston.)
The makeover could not have modified Phillips’s life, nevertheless it did alter Mademoiselle’s destiny. The story was an exceptional success, drawing sufficient new readers to show across the struggling journal, which was barely a 12 months outdated when Phillips wrote her letter.
Senz began writing common columns, every that includes before-and-after images of a girl with a standard look drawback. In January 1937, as an example, Senz reworked an unnamed girl whom he described, precisely however tactlessly, as “quick, fats, stocky, and lacking in engaging female curves.” He reworked her “spherical, moonlike face” with make-up and a brand new coiffure, gave her a corset that took two inches off her hips, and put her in a costume with extensive shoulders and a V-neck to elongate her form. How she reacted to the makeover—or to Senz’s blunt feedback—we don’t know.
Mademoiselle additionally turned Phillips’s thought into an annual contest. By 1938, Mademoiselle’s circulation had quintupled and a few 5,000 younger ladies despatched in letters and images, vying for the possibility to win a visit to New York and a whole magnificence overhaul. Kallie Foutz, a 26-year-old style copywriter from Salt Lake Metropolis and certainly one of Brigham Younger’s great-granddaughters, was particularly decided. To make her “earlier than” picture as ugly as doable, she washed her hair in harsh cleaning soap to take away all of the curl and physique, caught her newly lank locks behind her ears, plucked out her eyebrows and drew new ones in an unflattering form, and, remembers her youthful brother, “fastidiously assembled a wardrobe that was wildly out of style.”
In her contest entry, Foutz referenced the identical transformative fairy story Phillips had, writing about how she’d cherished The Ugly Duckling when she was a baby “as a result of I used to be an unpleasant duckling and, with the incorrigible optimism and blind hope of maximum youth, dreamed of the day after I too would turn out to be a wonderful swan.” In contrast to Phillips, she didn’t emphasize altering her life, simply her seems to be. She wished her look to match her interior self. “My soul pretty glitters,” she wrote, “and but I’m swiftly handed by for the glamour women who know learn how to profit from their seems to be.”
As the competition winner, Foutz obtained six weeks in New York and makeover therapies that included cosmetic surgery and speech classes, together with a brand new coiffure, make-up, and a complete new wardrobe. When she returned dwelling, her little brother didn’t acknowledge her. “Hoping they had been returning my sister,” he remembers, “I used to be disillusioned as one of the lovely ladies I had ever seen stepped out of the automobile.”
In contrast to Phillips, Foutz stored her new look and the show-business ambitions it furthered. She labored for some time as a radio and TV host, then went on to turn out to be {a magazine} author and ghostwriter for superstar memoirs. She married a screenwriter and lived in Hollywood and New York Metropolis. “My great-grandfather went west in 1847 to alter the map,” she stated of her makeover. “I’ve come east in 1938 to alter my map.” It labored. In Foutz’s case, the “ugly duckling” actually was a swan inside.
My 2013 e-book The Energy of Glamour will not be about style or magnificence per se however quite about glamour in many various varieties, various with the viewers. Researching it took me down quite a lot of historic byways, together with early aviation and the placing similarities between Seventeenth-century Edo (now Tokyo) and 18th-century Paris, regardless of their lack of contact. The subject of this text, which initially appeared within the September 2013 difficulty of Attract, got here out of that analysis, though this historic element doesn’t seem within the e-book. All glamour contains the promise of escape and transformation.
Virginia Postrel is a author with a specific curiosity within the intersection of commerce, tradition, and expertise. Creator of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Model,” “The Energy of Glamour,” and, most just lately, “The Cloth of Civilization.” This essay was initially revealed on Virginia’s publication on Substack.
Picture by Sujeeth Potla on Unsplash.
