The Marketing of the American Beauty

American Beauties: Drawings from the Golden Age of Illustration; An Online Exhibition

Jaro Fabry (1912-1953) 
Katherine Hepburn, ca. 1937 
Published as cover of Cinema Arts, 1937 
Watercolor and gouache on paper 
Swann Fund purchase 

The unprecedented success of the “Gibson Girl” in the 1890s unleashed a visual barrage of American beauties which lasted throughout the Golden Age of American Illustration and continues to this very day. The different types of women presented in this exhibition demonstrate not only a nationally evolving ideal of beauty, but also a concentrated effort on the part of publishers, advertisers, and the artists themselves to develop an easily identifiable, aesthetically pleasing product.

It is no wonder the marketers increasingly turned to the allure of the American female; in the early part of the twentieth century women were thought to control 80 percent or more of the consumer dollars expended in the United States. Accordingly, advertisers turned to images of feminine mystique to which consumers could aspire (and hopefully emulate) through the purchase of goods and services. Men were also charmed by these images, however, and magazine publishers used the attraction of pretty faces on their covers to boost impulse buying for their all-important newsstand sales.

But the ideal of beauty that was being sold in the ads and on these covers was quite narrowly focused. It is not by coincidence that most of the works in this exhibition, from the Gibson Girl to Fabry’s Cinema Arts cover of Katherine Hepburn portray women of the upper or upper-middle class. Women of color or of the working classes did not have the disposable income to be targeted, and so are rarely, if ever, seen in these illustrations. Advertisers instead used various tableaux of wealth and modernity, which the middle-class consumer could then enter through purchase of a given product. Visual repetition also played a part in these scenarios: the trappings of the “Holeproof Hosiery Girl” (whom Coles Phillips helped to create) and the aloof style of McClelland Barclay’s “Fisher Body Girl” could be recognized at a single glance. In the advertisement shown above, the consumer is invited to share the risqué modernity of Edward Penfield’s beauty, shown wearing a man’s overcoat at what appears to be the breakfast table, with the familiar Hart, Schaffner, & Marx emblem on the wall behind her.

Magazine publishers were also quick to see how the American beauty could enhance their packaging. But beyond the aesthetic attraction of the pretty faces, art editors used these images to establish an instantly recognizable product that would attract a particular demographic to a given magazine. The sophisticated dress and elongated lines of the women portrayed on Vanity Fair covers directly appealed to the modern taste of that magazine’s urban, upper-class patrons, while the exotic appeal of the “Benda Girl” proved a better fit with the middle-class masses who read Hearst’s International. Repetition served its purpose in covers as it did in ads — in what became the predecessor to today’s “Cosmo girl,” William Randolph Hearst used Harrison Fisher’s drawings on virtually every cover of his Cosmopolitan magazine from 1912 until the artist’s death in 1934. Likewise, a mere glance at a John Held flapper alerted the readers of the 1920s that they were probably looking at an issue of either Life or Judge magazine.