Beauty patches anno 1948

I’m currently doing research for a post on Madame Isis' Toilette on the history on beauty patches for and I came across this little gem that I thought would interest you here. Beauty patches as fashion assessor in 1948.

Found in LIFE, 2 February 1948

  

BEAUTY PATCHES

The romantic looks get a boost from still another old custom

Tiny adhesive pieces of black silk are pasted on girls’ skin to direct maximum male attention to their best features. Backs, eyes or lips.

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In their concerted drive toward studied femininity, U.S. high fashion leaders have revived full, frilly petticoats, long, swirling skirts and tiny waist-pinchers. Reaching once more into the past, they have come up with still another proved artifice in the crusade for ultrafeminity: the beauty patch. The U.S. has seen spots on the face twice before: in the late 18^th Century and briefly in the 1920s. In England, besides being an adjunct to beauty, they were worn by politically conscious ladies to signify whether they were Tory or Wig. In Imperial Rome, where the patches had their beginning, they were used to satisfy artificially a superstitious interest in moles and blemishes. The new patches, neither superstitious nor political, are pure vanity- designed to accent a fair complexion and highlight a woman’s most beautiful feature, whether it’s her lips, eyes or back (above).

[Picture of woman in day dress and hat with a heart-shaped patch near here mouth. The text says: WORN WITH HAT at recent Lilly Daché fashion preview, beauty patch was an essential part of costume. Patch will ordinarily worn with evening dress.]

BOX OF PATCHES sells for $2. Each assortment of 100 silk spots has eight shapes, including hearts, circles, diamonds, stars, half-moon and squares.

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The Pirate 1948

In June I wrote a post about using historical movies as inspiration and the movie that triggered that post was the musical The Pirate from 1947 starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. Manuela (Garland) dreams about a dashing pirate, Mack “the Black” Macoco, but agrees to marry a rich, boring and much older Don Pedro. A circus performer, Serafin (Kelly) falls in love with her and pretends to be Macoco in order to woe her. After some twists and turns- it turns out that Don Pedro is the aging Macoco, everything ends happily for Manuela and Serafin. And as it is a movie with Garland and Kelly, there is a fair amount singing and dancing. The movie is set in the Caribbean in the 1840’s, but the costume designer, Tom Keogh, plays rather fast and loose with historical accuracy and nods quite equally to the contemporary fashions of the 1940’s. A hundred years earlier the fashion dictated sloping shoulders, puffed sleeves, a rather high, but narrow waist and a full skirt with many petticoats. There were also some rather oddly shaped hairstyles, like this fashion plate indicates.

A Song Is Born

I had a crush on Danny Kaye when I was a kid; he looked so kind and funny. A Song is Bornfrom 1948 is the only one I have seen again as an adult and I still like it a lot. I didn’t know, until I started to write this post that it is actually a remake of a Ball of Fire from 1941 with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck- I need to find that movie! As I understand it the plot is basically the same, but A Song Is Born is a musical, collecting a number of the times great musicians, like Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong.